Jessica K. Sklar and Bronna A. Butler
Mathematician Jessica K. Sklar and artist Bronna A. Butler began collaborating as QED Arts, LLC in Spring 2020, after serendipitously connecting at the 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.
The artists have invented a cipher for this artwork. The piece includes the key to the cipher and a ciphertext message; the poem and the image to its right describe how to order the ciphertext’s triangles when deciphering. The pattern of subtriangles in the large central triangle comes from Aleš Drápal and Carlo Hämäläinen’s paper, “An enumeration of equilateral triangle dissections” (“Discret. Appl. Math.,” 158(14), 2010, 1479–1495), in which the authors analyze dissections of equilateral triangles into equilateral triangles. The ciphertext describes this pattern. (The coloring of the triangles is the artists’.) Deciphering details for this and the artists’ companion piece, “Color Coded” (2021), can be found via the above link.