Marco Trevisan

Statement

Usually I enjoy and love mathematics for its minimal aesthetics, its purity and perfect balance. I work as an illustrator and as a math teacher, and I find that the contamination (or should I say convolution?) between these two worlds is fun and fruitful. I use illustration to warm up a bit the "cold and austere beauty" of mathematics, and in return I find myself often taking away elements from my illustrations rather than adding more stuff, as if I were trying to simplify an algebraic expression. The two pieces I present for Bridges 2018 are my perspective on the work of two great mathematicians, Bernhard Riemann and Kurt Gödel.

Artworks

In mathematics it's often difficult to pictorially represent abstract ideas and deep results. Luckily the Riemann Hypothesis, even if its details are quite complex (pun intended), has a beautiful geometric interpretation, namely it states that the zeros of a peculiar function lay in a straight line. In our "real" woods, mushrooms grow sometimes in fairy rings; in his "complex" forest Riemann believes that his favourite mushrooms follow a straight line.

My understanding of Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems is, alas, highly incomplete. Nevertheless with this illustration I tried to catch a glimpse of this tragic figure, sitting under an axiomatic system, about to eat a theorem he just demonstrated (which I like to imagine is one of "his" theorems), knowing that he will never be able to prove all true statements within that system.