Elliot Kienzle
I believe in the pedagogical power of a pretty picture. It can get
people interested, keep them engaged, and sometimes make the
incomprehensible click. I use art to aid and explain math, through
pretty diagrams. Even when direct representation is impossible, art
excels at conveying feeling. It helps communicate what mathematics
makes me feel. I hope for this to make high-level math more
accessible. It takes years of dedicated study to appreciate the
mathematics I want to convey, but anyone with eyes can appreciate the
art. I try to take the beauty we mathematicians see in symbols and put
it on the page for the world to see.
A slide from a presentation of mine. This depicts a hyperelliptic
curve as a branched cover of the Riemann sphere. It emphasizes the
orbifold structure induced on the Riemann sphere by this covering.
Each branch point looks like a cone, formed by folding an edge in
half.
A panorama of a (rather biased) selection of mathematics. From
left to right: ✦Chain complexes & Homology ✦The Fano plane and
octonion multiplication ✦ The E8 root lattice, which is the
lattice of integer octonions ✦ Lie algebra root systems,
supporting a blossoming Lie group tree ✦ Constructing a surface
by sewn discs together, using morse theory. ✦The Langlands
correspondence relating Galois groups, modular forms, and adeles
✦A few surfaces, hanging out ✦A very snakey snake lemma ✦The
circle doubling map applied to each pixel of an image quickly
becomes static, reflecting chaos. The analogous sphere doubling
map is $z \to z^2 + c$, whose dynamics describe the Mandelbrot
set.