The Effort to Understand

What I am trying to capture in my work--and what my work is essentially a metaphor of--is that effort to understand, namely the attempt to make sense of the world we are born into. Mathematics plays a critical role in my art, because it is the quintessential process by which human beings grasp the possible cognitive constructs of reality. It is via mathematical structures that we probe into the physical world. The general theory of relativity is a mathematical construct which not only agrees with the universe, but anticipates it.

It is indeed easy to depict the major theorems of mathematics, which I have done a substantial amount of, but what now interests me is the hard work of contemporary professional mathematicians. I want to attempt to portray math not as a perfectly constructed world, but as a place where things are begun in fits and starts, where there are dead ends, detours, traps, and only occasionally breakthroughs. In order to capture this very human aspect of trying to make sense of things, I too engage math with a sincere effort to understand its inner workings. This is important for only through an authentic and honest search for meaning can one truly reveal the spirit of these things.

Thus one often finds in my work layers of mathematical writing. These represent notes, proofs, calculations, or formulae that are the underpinnings of the mathematical visualization I am trying to make--the image is really the visual manifestation of these underlying ideas. I like to use my handwriting instead of LaTeX, because I really believe that math is a human endeavor and that mathematics is done today as it has always be done throughout the ages--with pen and paper. The great theorems that have been proven of late (Fermat's Last Theorem and Poincare's Conjecture) have all been done in this way.