Personal Reflection on Math Art Project

The point of the math art was to understand the math and the beauty that the art had demonstrated. We had asked Margaret Kempner about what lied in each representation of colours on the 8x8 board and what numbers were exactly represented in each tile. After reading her response through email and the famous math video channel called Numberphile, we started to grasp one by one the general meaning behind her art pieces and the reason why the colours and shapes are put in a certain pattern. In the end, I think we did a pretty good job of finding the beauty and math of it and yet there was a room for improvement, I believe, in addressing Ms. Kempner's contribution to our math art project in general. In other words, I was not articulate in expressing my gratitude toward Ms. Kempner in front of my friends and colleagues, which I should have. Though there was a simple mentioning of her name as a creator of the arts, I hope her kindness and generosity could be recognized by our interactions with her through email and through this blog.

The art that we have recreated based on the understanding of her art works had been successful in itself containing the meaning of magic-square, magic-path, and the rotational symmetry that had added a beauty into our piece. There was, however, a problem in addressing the mathematical concept fully to the audiences. The art project that we named as a magic square did not precisely portray what our art piece was. Our art was in fact impossible to be a magic-square as our sequence of numbers had followed a knight's path. Ours was semi-magical in that the sum of diagonals were not the same total as the rows and columns on the board. Also, there are different variations and different mathematical(graph theory, to be exact) terminologies for it based on how knight's path are established on a board of any size. For example, the concept of the Knight's path is brought up from the concept of Hamiltonian path which by definition for a given set of edges and vertices, there is a path that touches each vertex once and only once. If the Hamiltonian path comes back to the starting point, then the path becomes a circle and we call it a Hamiltonian circle. As I have missed in expressing our gratitude for Ms. Kempner's help, we have missed acknowledging the origin of math ideas that the art is based upon.

Overall, it was a great experience to showcase our arts to fellow audiences. There were good things that we had done such as communicating with the original creator and attempting to understand thoroughly how the mathematics is involved in it. But, also there were things that we needed to improve upon such as acknowledging the origin of math that the art is based upon and addressing the contribution of the original creator of the art piece to our project. It was a meaningful experience in that it makes us realize where we were and where we could improve for doing projects like in the future.