Bronna A. Butler and Jessica K. Sklar
Artist Bronna A. Butler and mathematician Jessica K. Sklar began
collaborating as QED Arts, LLC in Spring 2020, after serendipitously
connecting at that year's Joint Mathematics Meetings. They create
pieces that celebrate mathematics as a humanistic endeavor and honor
its elegance, working from the premises that mathematics is for
everyone and that whimsy and mathematics are not mutually exclusive.
This piece celebrates two Renaissance polymaths. Painter and
printmaker Albrecht Dürer wrote a series of four books on
geometry, in which, among other things, he described polyhedral
nets (arrangements of nonoverlapping edge-joined polygons in the
plane that can be folded to become the faces of a polyhedron). Our
piece pays homage to one of Dürer's most famous engravings,
featuring the Dürer polyhedron (and its net) and a magic square.
It also celebrates an Italian artist and cryptographer, whose
identity is left as a puzzle for the viewer. The viewer is
additionally challenged to decipher the ciphertext message in the
piece, as well as identify the hidden numbers in the magic square.