Math You Can See: Art, Nature, Patterns, Society, and More
Categories below are
- Visual Art: Tools You Can Use to Create
- Visual Art and Architecture: Artists' Works
- Visual Patterns and Visualizations of Math
- Music and Dance
- Science, Literature, Nature, and Food
- Society and Social Justice
VISUAL ART: TOOLS YOU CAN USE TO CREATE |
- Mosaic Painter
Online paining. Choose a mosaic type, then pick colors for different regions. - Muslim rule and compass: the magic of Islamic geometric design | Alex Bellos, The Guardian
Includes a step-by-step guide for you to create an Islamic-style tiling pattern (offline). - Silk
Really fun online math creation tool - beautiful use of symmetry and patterns. Sixth graders say it is "amazing," "calming," and "satisfying," and teaches you about symmetry. - Symmetry Artist | Math Is Fun
Draw lines, dots, and circles in different styles and colors, and this web app makes reflections or rotations of what you drew. - Recursive Drawing
As you create images, you can use those images as building blocks. Be sure to watch or read instructions at least some. - Tesselate
Put it in Edit mode and Edit Corner to change the shape being tesselated, then select colors and tesselate to see how it looks. - Star Polygon Generator
What it says. Play with the settings to make a star polygon you like, or just hit Randomize and go "Oooooooh." - Doodal
Online drawing tool that's sort of, um... fractally... oh, just go play with it. - Polyhedra from Cardstock (Slide-Togethers)
George Hart's templates and demonstrations of polyhedral constructions that can be made from cardstock. - A Valentine from Möbius | Radcliffe Institute
Want to make a valentine of two hearts linked? Cutting up two attached Moebius strips is really cool!! - CutOutFoldUp | cutoutfoldup.com
With patterns printed on paper or cardstock, scissors, and a lot of tape or glue, you can make beautiful mathematical models (though a warning - many look difficult).
VISUAL ART AND ARCHITECTURE: ARTISTS' WORKS |
- Islamic Art and Geometric Design | Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Geometry of Iran's Mosques | Inhabitat
- M.C. Escher article, including some of Escher's art and a Dutch video that includes him in his studio in 1971.
- Impossible World: Art
"Impossible art" by artists like MC Escher. - The Mathematical Art of Hamid Naderi Yeganeh
Here's a CNN article about Hamid Naderi Yeganeh: "Next da Vinci? Math whiz uses formulas to create fantastical works of art" - Henry Segerman's Math Art
Mathematical art; 3-D sculptures & 2-D prints. Very cool colorful & printable dodecahedron on the "Autoglyphs" page! - Bathsheba Sculpture on Shapeways | Bathsheba Grossman
- Readers’ Gallery | Math Munch
Fabric art and drawings from Math Munch readers that show math (especially geometry). - The Numbers Project | Brandon Todd Wilson
Graphic design "logos" for numbers from 0 to 365 (in reverse order).
VISUAL PATTERNS AND VISUALIZATIONS OF MATH |
- Visual Patterns
Not just tiles! Dozens of visual patterns with drawings and some real objects like Legos.
- Factorization - Visual illustration of divisor pairs | GeoGebraTube
- Multiplication Table, Drawn to Scale
Colorful multiplication table drawn to scale! (10 x 10 is 100 times bigger than 1 x 1). Fun! - Movies and Math, Animated | mathani.tumblr.com
Super cool! Some great problems (like 7/18/15 area one), many great animations (like 6/23/15 roots one). - The Harriss Spiral | Alex Bellos, The Guardian
Pretty fractal curve made golden-ratio-style. This article has a great description of what is going on mathematically. - Standing Two-Dimensional Waves Shown By Couscous | Steve Mould
Steve Mould uses couscous and a violin bow to create Chladni Figures demonstrating 2-dimensional standing waves. He includes a brief history of the math developed to understand them, mostly by Sophie Germain. - {3,3,7} Honeycomb Meets Plane at Infinity | Visual Insight
Gorgeous computer-generated image of "honeycomb in 3D hyperbolic space," etc. Just look at it!
MUSIC AND DANCE |
- Wintergatan Marble Machine (incredible musical instrument using 2000 marbles)
- 2017 Winner of Science Magazine's Dance Your Ph.D. Contest: Representations of the Braid Groups | Nancy Scherich
- Music from the Fibonacci Sequence | aSongScout
An explanation of what the Fibonacci sequence is, followed by piano music created from it. - The Saddest Thing I Know about the Integers | Evelyn Lamb
Math shows that you can't get perfect octaves from a bunch of perfect fifths. - What Pi sounds like | Michael Blake, YouTube
Surprisingly beautiful.
SCIENCE, LITERATURE, NATURE, AND FOOD |
- Fibonacci Numbers in Nature
- The Scale of the Universe
See how the sizes of things in our universe compare to each other. (There's also an app that lets you zoom in and out, but it requires Adobe Flash Player or iOS.) - Alice's adventures in algebra: Wonderland solved | Melanie Bayley, New Scientist
Fantastic analysis of Alice as a commentary on math ideas of the time. - Huge 3200 Year Old Tree
- What 2000 Calories Looks Like - YouTube
- Incommensurate Cheez-Its | Christopher Danielson (Trianglemancsd)
Are Big Cheez-Its REALLY "Twice the size!" of regular? Christopher and his kids are on the case. - Gauss / Curvature & Strength (& Pizza) | WIRED
SOCIETY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE |
- You Draw It: How Family Income Affects Children’s College Chances | NYTimes.com
Predict how college attendance depends on family income, then see how close you were.
- Are you reflected in the new Congress? [2014] | The Guardian
Enter demographic info (sex, age, etc.) and find out how many members of the 2014 Congress share it. (It's not perfect; for instance, it doesn't include any multiracial options.) - Equal Population Mapper (interactive)
Find how much of any part of the US it would take to have an equal population to NYC, or LA, or TX, or... - Mapping Migration in the United States | New York Times
Fascinating map showing where people living in each state in 1900, 1950, or 2012 were born. - Parable of the Polygons | Vi Hart
How small, harmless-seeming choices can make a harmful world: discrimination simulation. - Math in the Real World | Get The Math
Some "real world" math for various art/sports/jobs; some dubious connections. Supposedly about algebra, but the Math in Music one, at least, would be good for any proportions work. Some are better than others.