Intersections
A Public Art Exhibition
Mircea Draghicescu
Mircea Draghicescu studied Math and Computer Science at the University of Bucharest, Romania and got a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Penn State. After retiring from a career of teaching Computer Science and working as a software engineer, he returned to his longtime interest of finding new ways of “visualizing math,” both for teaching and inspiring math students and for creating original works of art.
He is an active member of the Bridges Organization on the mathematical connections in art, music, architecture, education, and culture and is the founder of a company that makes geometric construction sets for math education and creative play.
His works were exhibited at the Bridges and Joint Mathematics Meeting (JMM) art galleries.
Artwork
Spherical structure
Wood
15.75" x 15.75" x 15.75"
The internal structure of this sphere is based on a hierarchy of polyhedra that starts with the rectification of some "seed" (here a tetrahedron) and continues with each subsequent polyhedron being the rectification of the preceding one. There are three concentric layers: an octahedron inside a cuboctahedron inside a rhombicuboctahedron. All vertices have degree four and each cross-shaped piece corresponds to a vertex and its adjacent half-edges. Each piece also corresponds to an edge on the layer below, physically joining two pieces on this layer. In principle, this construct can be continued with more layers; in this work, 48 disks, corresponding to the vertices of a rectified rhombicuboctahedron, join the pieces on the outer layer.