Artists
Timothy Sun
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science, San Francisco State University
San Francisco, California, USA
Statement
I am currently an assistant professor in Computer Science at San Francisco State University. I work on topological graph theory, which is the study of drawing graphs on different kinds of surfaces, such as the plane, torus, or Klein bottle. My artistic work aims to illustrate results in my area of research through 3D printed sculptures.
Artworks
In 1963, J. W. T. Youngs discovered a symmetric, combinatorial embedding of a "neighborly" map with 12 countries, where each country borders every other country, in the orientable surface of genus 6. In a proper coloring of such a map, every country must be given a unique color. Using a partially automated process, I found a geometric realization of this map that preserves the entire dihedral symmetry. I then 3D printed each color individually and assembled them into the final model.