2020 Joint Mathematics Meetings
Anne Ligon Harding and Clayton Shonkwiler
Artists
Anne Ligon Harding
Senior Analyst
Grand Rounds
Fort Collins, Colorado, USA
Clayton Shonkwiler
Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, Colorado, USA
Statement
Anne Ligon Harding is a data analyst and printmaker. She works on improving access and outcomes in education and medicine. Clayton Shonkwiler is a mathematician and artist. He is committed to using geometry to understand the world.
Artworks
Light and Dark
33 x 60 cm
Linocut
2019
The trefoil is the simplest non-trivial knot. It is over-used as a blackboard example, but it is also ubiquitous in a number of other ways: in many random knot models, the typical knot has many small trefoil summands, and a theorem of Harrison Chapman shows that almost all minimal diagrams of alternating knots contain the trefoil as a subknot.
As the (3,2)-torus knot, the trefoil can have both 3-fold and 2-fold symmetry; we demonstrate the former and allude to the latter through color and juxtaposition in this hand-cut linoleum print.