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Math Art: Knot Mosaics

Peter Gustainis and I worked together to recreate Felicia Tabing's Knotical. We created the 4 tiles digitally to represent her artwork presented at Bridges Math Art 2017, then arranged the tiles in the same fashion as her original block print.To extend this artwork, we incorporated colours associated with Andy Warhol's work with pop art, giving each tile a different gradient. This allowed for a clearer representation of the transformations (symmetry, rotation, translation) present in this artwork. As you can see in the color schemes below, the work almost has a complete rotational symmetry.






As a challenge, we provided an activity where students were given a set of tiles and asked to represent 2 common knots - Solomon, and Trefoil - mosaically. Here is the link to our Google Slides presentation


This project was a fun inquiry to the ways that we can teach mathematical concepts alongside concepts in aesthetics - the ways that mathematicians create art through visual exploration of theories. As a musician, it makes me more and more curious about the ways that we can engage both the cognitive and socio-emotional parts of the brain to engage in learning both math and aesthetics at the same time.


As we developed this project, we realised more and more the ways that you could incorporate mathematic concepts, such as connecting lines, the colour wheel and color gradients, discovery of transformations in fashion art, and so forth. This really gave us an opportunity to think about the ways we perceive the math classroom as an interdisciplinary space. Using art as a medium to develop concepts math gives room for the representation of individuality and diversity of our student body.

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