It has been a year of endless Einsteins. In March, a group of mathematical mosaicists announced that they had discovered an “aperiodic tile,” a shape that can cover an infinite flat surface in a nonrepeating pattern — “einstein” is the geometric artistic term for this entity.
David Smith of England, a shape buff who made the original discovery and investigated it along with three collaborators with expertise in mathematics and computing, nicknamed it “the hat.”
Now the results are known of a competition organized by the National Museum of Mathematics in New York and the United Kingdom Mathematics Trust in London, which asked for the most creative interpretations of an Einstein.
A panel evaluated 245 submissions from 32 countries. Three winners were chosen and a ceremony was held in the House of Commons in London on December 12.
Among the judges was Smith, who said he was “captivated by the diversity and high standard of all the participants.”
What would you do with an Einstein mosaic? For 12-year-old William Fry of New York, the answer was: Play Tetris, of course! He named his monomosaic variant of the game Montris.
Evan Brock, 31, a display designer in Toronto, took home one of the top three prizes with his ravioli hat. Prepared with custom-made wooden molds, he promises “a more geometric dining experience,” his presentation notes.
Filled with potato and onion, Brock's ravioli are made from yellow (turmeric), orange (carrot) and red (beet) dough to create glare-free hat mosaics; and green dough (spinach) for the reflected tiles.
Other edible offerings included hat cakes and cookies, hat sandwiches and hat dosas.
Sy Chen, 61, an origami artist from Maryland, made hat mosaic figures by folding dollar bills.
Another classic approach involved more than 1,500 handmade ceramic tiles, assembled into a 7.3-meter frieze to decorate the window of a pottery workshop.
It was designed by Garnet Frost, 70, a London visual artist interested in architectural ornamentation, and the Alhambra Tiling Project, a nonprofit educational organization in the United Kingdom with ceramist Matthew Taylor and volunteers.
A hand-sewn patchwork tapestry, 63.5 centimeters high by 68.5 centimeters wide, came from Emma Laughton, 65, the retired owner of a gallery in Colyton, England. As Laughton explained: “The design seeks to please the eye with a combination of elements of repetition and apparent (almost) symmetry, which contrasts with the overall unpredictable aperiodicity.”
Shiying Dong, 41, a Connecticut housewife with a doctorate in physics and a master's degree in mathematics, folded a three-dimensional piece of paper art, another winner.
In the school category, the winner, Devi Kuscer, 17, a student at UWC Atlantic College in Wales, made a large kite out of hat mosaics.
Chaim Goodman-Strauss, a judge who was one of Smith's collaborators, described the kite as being made of hats, which in turn is made of kites made of hats.
Julien Weiner, 17, of New Orleans, conjured up a computer-generated Einsteinian succulent. “Humans 'invent' a new form in the same way that Sir Isaac Newton 'invented' gravity,” he declared.
“My proposal, titled The Einstein Bulb, imagines how, just as ignorance of gravity did not prevent us from contemplating the majesty of the moon rising in the night sky, the hat could exist in nature waiting to be discovered and explored.
“The Einstein Quiz really rekindled a love for math that I hadn't felt in years and reminded me that math doesn't begin and end in the classroom,” Weiner added.
By: SIOBHAN ROBERTS
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/7044712, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-12-26 22:15:05
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