Artists
Dan Bach
3d math artist / book designer
dansmathshop
oakland, california, usa
http://sketchfab.com/dansmath/models
Statement
After a 36-year teaching career, I am now a 3D math artist and interactive book author, trying to bring the joy and beauty of mathematics to an unsuspecting audience. Students convinced me long ago that my nice-looking calculus graphs could qualify on their own as art. Math is perceived by many as being separate from art, but as creators and viewers of math art, we enjoy using both halves of our brains! My art displays mathematical relationships and visual patterns in a way that I hope makes people stop, notice, and say, "That's cool! That's math?"
Artworks
• When is a space curve or a series of line segments knotted? When it can't be reduced to a band without cutting or passing through itself, that's when! This image is a tribute to the field of Knot Theory, and ways to untangle knots are called Reidemeister moves.
• Several “trefoil knots” are shown here. The main blue tube contains a polygonal knot consisting of segments in space. Other images include a cubical lattice knot and its B-spline curves (bottom and bottom right), knots wrapped around a triangular torus (upper left), and polygonal knots with many segments (upper right).
• At the lower left we see the simplest polygonal trefoil knot, with stick number six. In some cases the spline curve may not be knotted! (follow link for 3D)