2011 Joint Mathematics Meetings
Jeffrey Stewart Ely
Artists
Jeffrey Stewart Ely
Associate Professor of Computer Science
The Department of Mathematical Sciences, Lewis and Clark College
Portland, Oregon, USA
Statement
I am interested in applying computer graphical techniques to illuminate mathematical processes and objects. Ideally, this can lead to a deeper understanding or at least to an increased appreciation and/or awareness of the process or object. Some of my projects are implemented as billions of particles, others use the ray-tracing technique and hundreds of millions of rays. In either case, I do not use "canned" software, preferring to write the code myself to first principles.
Artworks
Bucky Madness
20"x20"
Digital Print on Archival Paper
2010
This is my response to a request to make a ball and stick model of the buckyball carbon molecule.
After deciding that a strict interpretation of the molecule lacked artistic flair, I proceeded to use it
as a theme. Here, the overall structure is a 60-node truncated icosahedron (buckyball), but each
node is itself a buckyball. The center sphere reflects this model in its surface and also recursively
reflects the whole against a mirror that is behind the observer.
I was recently surprised to read in David Richeson's book, Euler's Gem, that Legendre proved
Euler's Formula, V - E + F = 2, by projecting a polyhedron onto a sphere and then summing the
areas of the various spherical polygons. I think this fact resonates rather well with this design.