2025 Joint Mathematics Meetings
Gabriele Meyer
Artists
Gabriele Meyer
Senior Lecturer Emerita
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Madison, Wisconsin, USA
Statement
I love to make linocuts of sea shells, representing mathematical beauty in nature. You can see spirals, dilations, smooth curve families, patterns that are generated by Rule 30, and self similar fractal lines. The technical difficulty is to show the patterns *and* the play of light and shadow on the shells.
Artworks
The murex florifer is a snail with triple fractal ridges. The cyrtopleura costata or angel wing is very delicate and shows a family of smooth curves. I put them into the same image to emphasize the contrast between fractal lines and smooth curves. The original images of these shells were from public sources on the web, which I modified and adapted. The shells are quite small, the murex is less than 6 cm, and the angelwing typically less than 8 cm. Size is not necessary for beauty!
The melon shell, melo aethiopica, is seen from the top and shows its beautiful spiral build. The other snail has ribs spiralling down from the snail’s tip. I photographed my own shells to model for this linocut.