Amrita Acharyya, Uli Gaenshirt

Statement

We, Amrita & Uli, met for our first time on the excursion day of the 2024 Bridges Conference in Richmond VA. Since we got along very well and thanks to our common love for artistic-mathematical work, we stayed in touch even after this one day. We exchanged pictures, ideas, questions and answers. As an experiment, we collaged Amrita's paintings, which were hand-drawn with ball pen and acrylic color, with Uli's digital handwork. We further developed the mathematical parts of Amrita's drawings and described them in a short paper with the title “Collaboration on a Mathematical Sarasvati Allegory”. In a final step, we supplemented the geometric elements with some details from Amrita's images to give the overall picture a synthetic character.

Artworks

The central portrait, outlined by a cardioid, serves here as a personification of the fractal Mandelbrot set, whose inner main part has an adequate shape. The four-armed Sarasvati, who among many other tasks is also responsible for art and mathematics, instructs the two allegorical headdress ladies of the central portrait into the fascinating relationship between geometry and algebra by means of three smaller Mandelbrot sets. The lady on the left tries to understand the relationship between the Mandelbrot set and the green Julia set, while the lady on the right explores the surprising correlations between the negative x-axis of a Mandelbrot set and the opposite r-axis of the bifurcation tree of the logistic equation.