Elaine Krajenke Ellison

Statement

An appreciation and demystification is a common thread that runs through my mathematical art. Drawing, bronze, painting, glass, and photography were mediums I had investigated before l980. In the early l980's, I settled on fabric to tell my mathematical stories. The topics I have quilted include early mathematics from 2,000 B. C. E. to mathematics of the present time. During this time span I have quilted over 55 mathematical quilts. Most quilts are sewn by hand. Primitive Pythagorean Triples is quilted by machine. The current work in progress is titled: Landmarks in Algebra. Four significant contributions include the Plimpton 322, Diophantine equations, Brahmagupta's area formula, and Al-Kwarizmi's completing the square.

Artworks

In 2015, Margaret Kepner designed a quilt base on B.Berggren's discovery of a tree of Pythagorean Triples. This idea inspired me to create a quilt of triples that develop from using matrices. F. J. Barning showed this could be done in 1963. A Primitive Pythagorean Triples is a set of three integers, with no common divisor, that corresponds to the sides of a right triangle. This result may be graphically represented as an infinite ternary tree with (3,4,5) as the root node. This tree appeared in papers of A. Hall in 1970 and A. R. Kanga in 1990.