Dan Bach

Statement

After a 36-year teaching career, I am now a 3D math artist and interactive book creator. Students convinced me long ago that my nice-looking calculus graphs could qualify on their own as art. I now spend my time conceiving and creating math art, trying to bring the joy and visual beauty of mathematics to an unsuspecting audience. In the popular culture, math is commonly perceived as being separate from art, and people often cry "I'm not a math type, I'm creative!" But as makers and viewers of math art, we enjoy using both halves of our brains! My work displays mathematical relationships and visual patterns in a way that I hope makes people stop, notice, and say, "That's cool! That's math?"

Artworks

Prime numbers are extracted using the classic Eratosthenes Sieve method. I wanted to show this process visually, using real materials: wood dowels and beads, with a pegboard base and a drilled Lexan plastic top. Numbers from 1 to 121 are displayed in an 11 x 11 grid, starting at the lower left. The layers colored yellow, blue, orange, green, and red represent multiples of 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11. The composite numbers show their prime factors on the floor, and those unaffected by the colored balls are the primes, in white. What do you notice about the factors on the floor?

Three shapes: a glass cylinder, a surface of revolution, and a lumpy vase, are adorned with colored bands. The cylinder shows the evolution of a sine wave into a square wave using Fourier series, and the other two have rainbows of sine curve loops with varying heights and frequencies. The beach and ocean environment is a natural choice for the found glass items.