Douglas McKenna - Thirteenski - At The AMS Show in San Diego - January

The next few days I am going to diverge from mathematical poetry and display some of the visual mathematics work done by many talented people who have their work admitted to the American Mathematical Society mathart show coming up in January.

The following vismath piece is by Douglas McKenna who was kind enough to invite me to visit his studio a couple of years ago. Since then I have been a fan of his 'space filling curves'.

Mathartist statement:

The original Peano and Hilbert Curves represent two out of three techniques for "threading a square". The generalized third technique I recently conceived connects square corners with side centers. "Thirteenski" is an asymmetric, recursive traversal of 13 symmetrically arranged sub-squares that eventually converges as a space-filling curve at different geometric scales according to a Sierpinski Carpet-like pattern. The resulting pattern wonderfully illustrates a struggle between symmetry and asymmetry, arising from the underlying combinatoric constraints governing the solution space.