On Thursday, October 16th, math department faculty member Aileen Logan-Tyson took several calculus students to an artist talk at Smith college. Pau Atela, from the Smith College Mathematics and Statistics Department, introduced Richard Tuttle, an acclaimed contemporary visual artist who recently had an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and a retrospective of his 40 year career at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In his talk, Tuttle reflected on the intersections between math and art and the essentially creative nature of both. The students were interested in Tuttle's abstract approach to the representation of numbers and the evening's talk ended with an audience question and answer session.
Tuttle's talk was the opening event for the installation "X=," a three-day art and math participation at the A.P.E. Gallery in Northampton, which was the inaugural event for MathStudio, an ongoing creative studio space focusing on process and dialogue about art and mathematics.