2022 Joint Mathematics Meetings
Laura Nica
Artists
Laura Nica
Architect, Digital Designer & Lecturer
University of Westminster
London, United Kingdom
Statement
Laura N is a digital designer and an architect. Her broader interest's extent to material research, digital fabrication and simulation tools. Through parametric experiments and physical modelling, Laura analyses systems (either mathematical, biological, natural or structural), understanding the rules and tests out various parameters and spatial properties, which can then be scaled up to architectural or installation level.
Artworks
Scherk Minimal Surfaces - Iterations
These 3D print models, defining various Scherk surfaces can have many iterations, according to the number of saddle branches, number of holes, turn around the axis and bends towards the axis. As architectural exploration, the challenge has always been fabrication. Please see above the link to more information.
In mathematics, a Scherk surface (named after Heinrich Scherk in 1834) is an example of a minimal surface. This is a surface that locally, minimizes its area (or having a mean curvature of zero). Initially, an attempt to solve Gergonne’s problem, a boundary value problem in the cube, these surfaces arise from the solution to a differential equation that describes a minimal Monge patch (a patch that maps [u, v] to [u, v, f(u, v)]). The full surface is obtained by putting a large number the small units next to each other in a chessboard pattern.