2022 Bridges Conference

Sarah Glaz and Mark Sanders

Artists

Sarah Glaz

Emeritus Professor of Mathematics

Department of Mathematics, The University of Connecticut

Storrs, Connecticut, USA

sarah.glaz@uconn.edu

https://www2.math.uconn.edu/~glaz/

Statement

The poet, Sarah Glaz, resides in the US. She is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Connecticut specializing in the area of commutative algebra. Her poetry is often inspired by mathematics and its history. Mark Sanders, from Northamptonshire, UK, is a collage and ceramic artist whose work engages with surrealism. His collage construction is driven by research and combines materials already in his stockpile with new components as required by the subject. This is the fourth poem-collage pair on which Sarah Glaz and Mark Sanders collaborated. The piece is part of their larger joint poem-collage project involving the ancient history of mathematics.

Artworks

Image for entry 'The Death of Euclid'

The Death of Euclid

30 x 42 cm

Digital print, collage materials, paper, ink

2021

Additional info

Euclid (323–285 BCE) lived in Alexandria, a Greek city situated in Egypt at the mouth of the Nile. He founded a school of mathematics at Alexandria’s famous center of learning, the Museum. Very little is known about his life beyond the monumental achievement of writing “The Elements,” a book that had profound impact on Western thought, and set the foundation for mathematical standards of reasoning for all times. The poem was inspired by the magnitude of Euclid’s impact on future mathematics; while the collage represents and extends visually the poem’s content. The collage’s centerpiece is a map of Alexandria cut into the outline of the diagram used by Euclid to prove Pythagoras Theorem. See the link under the image for more information.