Audrey Nasar
I am a mathematics professor, illustrator, and an occasional
ceramicist. A recent exploration in the mathematics of mazes as
described by Anthony Phillips, inspired me to apply the technique of
sgraffito to create simple alternating mazes. In sgraffito, the clay
is painted with an underglaze which is then scratched off to reveal
the clay underneath before going into the kiln.
Each maze shown can be described by its level sequence, which is
the sequence obtained by numbering the levels in the maze,
starting with 0 on the outside and 8 on the inside, and then
recording the sequence of levels traveled along the path from the
outside to the inside. Of the 42 possible level 8 mazes, 4 are
depicted here. They have level sequences 072543618, 032147658,
034567218, and 016345278 (clockwise starting with the top left
maze). Some of the level sequences are symmetric in that if each
number n in the sequence is replaced by 8-n, the sequence reads
the same backwards.