Bridges 2025 Exhibition of Mathematical Art, Craft, and Design

Jay Thakkar

Artists

Jay Thakkar

Senior Project Associate

Center for Creative Learning, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar

Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India

j.thakkar@iitgn.ac.in

http://ccl.iitgn.ac.in/

Statement

Jay Thakkar is a researcher at the Center for Creative Learning, IIT Gandhinagar. His interest is in making school mathematics engaging and inspiring using interdisciplinary approach. The Center has been working to transform STEM education in India and communicate Science and Maths in an engaging manner to the public since the last 8 years. It has conducted workshops for over 12,000 teachers and developed over 750+ activities and models and has reached over 5 lakh teachers and students. Also, the online programs have received an online viewership of over 2 crore.

Artworks

Image for entry 'Variations of A-Puzzle-A-Day: Polyhex and Polyomino Fitting Puzzle'

Variations of A-Puzzle-A-Day: Polyhex and Polyomino Fitting Puzzle

2.0 x 60.0 x 60.0 cm

Medium-Density Fibreboard (MDF)

2024

Additional info

The first version consists of 6 unique pentomino pieces with task of fit the subset of the pices such that only the current date-number is visible. The next level is to display date-day-month, consists of 7 pentomino and 3 tetromino pieces. In the next version, we changed the pieces to polyhexes and calendar in a hexagonal grid. The level-1, (display date number) consisting 7 tetra-hexes and one di-hex piece. The next level is to display date-day-month, which consists of 7 tetrahex pieces, 3 trihex pieces, 2 pentahex pieces. The board and pices have been computationally designed making sure all solutions are reachable.
Image for entry 'Color Portrait with RGB String Art'

Color Portrait with RGB String Art

140.0 x 140.0 x 5.0 cm

Thread and Wood

2024

Portrait by weaving 4500 straight lines of red, green and blue threads in a circle. First the computer algorithm employs a greedy approach to iteratively optimise string placement, ensuring the final string art closely matches the original image. Then 15 hours of thread work to iteratively weave RGB threads (200 lines for each color in iterations) on a circle with 4 feet diameter and 300 equidistant points.