Doing some artistic thinking because I've got to fill a lot of picture frames in the department in a hurry.
Ignoring the colours, which ones do you like the most?
No image descriptions because these are all pretty abstract!
(1/2)

Art* is going on walls!
On the right is one of the Truchet pieces I shared above, and the other is made up of handwriting samples I gathered from colleagues. It feels good to finally put something out with this!

Here's a closeup of the handwriting one. I wandered round the department knocking on doors, asking people to write some mathematical notation. It was fascinating seeing the different symbols and conventions used in different disciplines.
What can you spot in this snippet?

To make this, I took photos of all the handwriting samples, then used to convert them to vector images. I separated out individual characters, then wrote code to lay characters along line segments making up a hexagon tiling.
My idea was to have something that gives you an idea of notation used by mathematicians, but better than the 'cumulonumbers' nonsense you normally get.
There's just enough coherence to identify subdisciplines, but I didn't worry about keeping whole formulas intact.

I wanted it to have a dark background so it would look like writing on a blackboard, but I was told I can't print a 99% black page at A0.
Eventually, I want to put the original handwriting samples on the school website, along with links to the authors' homepages and short explanations of what they're about.
I learnt a lot about what my colleagues do just by asking them to write a line or two of !

Another one. Here, flocks of arrowheads are tracing out the Herschel graph.
The Herschel graph is something I keep returning to, because our building is named after its inventor.

It's the smallest non-Hamiltonian polyhedral graph - you can't draw a path on it which visits each vertex exactly once, and it corresponds to a polyhedron.
There's no such thing as a "lap" of this graph which doesn't cross itself somewhere.

There's an easy proof of this: you can colour the vertices red and blue so that no vertices joined by an edge are the same colour, and there are an odd number of vertices.
So any lap visiting each vertex once has to end on a different colour to the start.
Here's an image showing the colouring property, by David Eppstein. If you start on blue, you have to finish on red, and vice versa.

How do you convey non-hamiltonianicity? I've got flocks of boids endlessly trying to trace out the graph. They're chasing (invisible) rabbits which are randomly walking the graph.

oops, just noticed I forgot to tag @11011110 in the above toot, for making that diagram. Follow him!

A Mastodon instance for maths people. The kind of people who make $$\pi z^2 \times a$$ jokes. Use $$ and $$ for inline LaTeX, and $ and $ for display mode.