Owen "OAT" Rohm
Hello! My name is Owen Rohm, but you can call me “OAT”. I am a 20 year
old industrial design student at the Georgia Institute of Technology
in Atlanta, Georgia. I’ve always hung around a bunch of artists, to
whom I seem a total nerd, and a bunch of total nerds who find me
unbearably artsy (A duality I’m sure is foreign to all of you at the
Bridges art/math conference). The perfect project to me is one that
seems wildly silly, provides some value in people’s lives, is
sustainably produced, and incorporates some beautiful aspect of
mathematics. I find inspiration in a very diverse set of places, and
every year Bridges is one of them! Please reach out, I’d love to talk
about anything!
My grandmother (Nana) is a connoisseur of puzzles. Her collection
is vast and impressive. Watching her sort pieces and
systematically complete a puzzle is akin to watching a master
sushi chef deftly fillet a fugu fish. The problem is, there are
only so many puzzles out there. As such, I set out to make a
puzzle based on a Truchet tiling that could be done differently
each time with the same set of pieces. After designing some tile
shapes and patterns which could fit together regardless of how
they were rotated, I laser cut them out of acrylic. With 7
different types of piece, some of which with multiple options for
rotations, and an 11x15 grid, there are at least… uh… a lot of
different combinations for puzzles! (9.64 * 10^24ish)