Intersections
A Public Art Exhibition
Dan Bach
Math is commonly perceived as being separate from art, and people often cry "I'm not a math type, I'm creative!" But as makers and viewers of math art, we enjoy using both halves of our brains! My art displays mathematical relationships and visual patterns in a way that makes people stop and say, "That's cool! That's math?"
When I was a math teacher, students convinced me that my nice-looking calculus graphs could qualify on their own as art. I now spend my time trying to bring the joy and visual beauty of mathematics to an unsuspecting audience.
Artwork
Dan’s Prime Logs
Inkjet print on canvas
21.5” x 38.5”
$650
The artwork “Dan’s Prime Logs” is from 2022, and is based on the same principle as the Slide Rule. The colored cylinders have length log(p) for various primes, starting with p = 2: red, 3: green, etc.
Each number n, from 2 to 42, has a prime factorization
n = p1 * p2 * … * pk, so that log(n) = log(p1) + … + log(pk). This makes the prime logs stack up just right! You can read off the factorizations of various n’s from the picture.
The sun is made up of cyclotomic integers, which (if you must know) are linear combinations of fifth roots of unity in the complex plane.
(Drawn in Mathematica and imported into Pixelmator.)