Jana Kopfová
Artists
Jana Kopfová
Associate Professor of Mathematics
Mathematical Institute of the Silesian University
Opava, Czech Republic
Statement
As a child, I dreamed to study mathematics and arts. I became a profesional mathematician and my love of arts is my hobby. I am trying to spread the beauty of Mathematics through all what I do - through my lectures, through math circles to high school students, through animated movies about Math, which I helped to create, and lately also through Silk paintings. I love flowers and geometrical designs and playing with the technique a colors.
Artworks
Flower spiral
15 x 20 x 1 cm
Silk, silk paint
2017
This is a flower Fibonacci spiral. Fibonacci numbers are also used on a flower design. I like to connect the beauty of Mathematics and Arts and Nature. Fibonacci numbers are a fascinating phenomena to demonstrate this. The idea came during my work on a Golden ratio animated movie.
Spiral cube
20 x 20 x 20 cm
Silk, silk paint
2018
I wanted to make a silk paint math inspired project in 3D, and since I had some square silk frames, cube came to my mind. I also wanted to continue with my fascination in spirals and connect spirals on a cube surface to create a model of a dynamical system on a cube surface. I searched for a symmetric pattern. This lead to a simple problem from graph theory, how to color each vertex of a cube in one of 4 colors so each side contains all 4 different colors. And finally, because I love nature and flowers especially, I choose a floral pattern.
The result is a cube with spirals of 4 different colors, each going from a middle of one cubes sides to another one. Can you find out if any two sides are identical?