Frank A. Farris

Designers

Frank A. Farris

Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science

Santa Clara University

San Jose, CA

https://webpages.scu.edu/ftp/ffarris/

Biography

Frank A. Farris has taught at Santa Clara University since 1984. At Pomona College and MIT, he was dazzled by the concept of spaces of functions; these have now become the "design spaces" for his work. Awarded the Best Photograph, Painting, or Print" at the 2018 JMM art exhibition, Farris's work has appeared in numerous solo shows at colleges and universities across the US. His book, Creating Symmetry, the Artful Mathematics of Wallpaper Patterns from Princeton University Press, explains his techniques for using complex wave functions to create patterns based on photographic material. He attended the Illustrating Mathematics seminar at ICERM in 2019 and helps to coordinate the Bay Area Art and Math group (BAAM!).

Looks

About the look

Color-Wheel Robe

Digital print on cotton robe

2024

Since the late 1990s, I have used digital color wheels for the purpose of depicting complex-valued functions in the plane, using the domain-coloring algorithm. In 2024, I revisited the idea of how color wheels can be created additively from primary colors. This led me to design wheels with varying degrees of rotational symmetry in the pattern. The technique involves embedding an n-cube in the 3-dimensional RGB cube, with the embedding adjusted to allow a personal choice of the primary colors (around the edges of the wheels) that are successively added to white at the center of the wheels. The photograph also shows the stained-glass window by Hans Schepker that I commissioned in 2007, from an earlier cycle of work on color wheels.