The Maths/Art Nexus
From Mathsreach
- Download article: The Maths/Art Nexus (IMAges Issue 11: October 2011)
Until the end of 2010, expatriate New Zealander Peter James Smith was Professor of Mathematics and Art at RMIT in Victoria, Australia.
He concentrates on the language of maths in his paintings. “I don’t like beautiful symmetric diagrams; the formulae that produce symmetry are interesting but not the picture of symmetry. It’s wonderful to bring to non-mathematicians some of the simple delights of how group theory works - the 1+1= 0 argument - they’re so used to the language that they don’t know what a gift it is.”
The mathematical language in his paintings has included data sets, such as 1880s experiments on speed of light, and the orbital elements (position, location and appearance) of Halley’s Comet. “It illustrates how statistics is such a powerful thing – by gathering that data you get to know about the world. I used a lot of theorems and simple proofs, often from number theory, and my own research; I produced a new result on a painting before it was published in a journal. That’s when the nexus is working really well, having that moment of insight when you’re working on a canvas that mathematicians have at the blackboard.”
He was in New Zealand to give a lecture on Truth + Beauty, the title of his recent solo exhibitions and of a book he is writing. “It contextualises the mark making on my paintings over the last 30 years. It will have a lot of maths - understanding the nature of proof, deductive reasoning; all those things art people don’t know. The process of proofs and the failed alleyways that mathematicians go down to discover things are very precious.”
“Starting with axioms and definitions and constructing and proving theorems - just like Euclid built all geometry from five axioms - that’s the wonder and the magic.”
Smith was one of two Antarctic New Zealand Artist Fellows in early 2010. Their most mathematically interesting find was NASA’s website tracking of icebergs between 2000 and 2005, when they drifted north of Christchurch. “The traces they left bordered on chaos theory; it’s an interesting relationship between something mathematically chaotic and some scribbled mark.”
In 2010, Smith was applying linear regression to art and real estate markets. “It’s ironic that when you retire, your research suddenly starts looking hopeful! I was working with a database of realised secondary market (auction) prices for art, which is an example of left censoring. The information you have is not the actual realised price, but you know the price is less than the reserve because it was passed in at auction. The reserve therefore becomes a left censored data point. Real estate people would pay millions to type in an address and get a value for a property based on sales and properties passed in at auction.”
Like all teachers, Smith aimed to ‘future-proof ’ his statistics teaching. “You teach students what boxplots look like, so they can recognise the analytical thinking that goes into that object when it changes to a new generation, and they can question it and invent a better one.” However, he thinks there is a danger with “pressing a button on statistics software that works dynamically”, because at the end they still may not know what the animation represents.
“Variability is very difficult for students to understand. I think it takes more than slick software.”
