Mathematics Meets Art: Crocheting Coral Reefs

My guest this week is artist & science communicator Margaret Wertheim.

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Margaret Wertheim is a science writer and artist whose work focuses on relations between science and the wider cultural landscape. With degrees in math and physics, she is animated by a view that science is a field of conceptual enchantment and a socially embedded activity. Wertheim is the author of seven books, including Pythagoras’s Trousers, a History of Physics and Religion; The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet; and Physics on the Fringe, an exploration of ‘outsider science.’ Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Guardian, Cabinet, Aeon, and many others. She and her sister Christine Wertheim are co-founders of the Institute For Figuring, a Los Angeles-based practice devoted to “the aesthetic dimensions of science and mathematics.” Their Crochet Coral Reef project is the world’s largest participatory science+art endeavor, with over 25,000 participants in 50 cities and countries, that has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Helsinki Biennial, The Smithsonian (D.C.), Museum of Arts and Design (NYC), Museum Frieder Burda (Germany), Schlossmuseum Linz (Austria), and elsewhere. Margaret’s Reef TED Talk has been viewed 1.6 million times. She has worked on all seven continents and stood on the South Pole.

Margaret is one of the most exciting, iconoclastic thinkers I have ever encountered. No bio or preamble is really going to do justice to the breadth of scholarship, art, education, and staggering hybridity that comprises her practice.

I first brushed with her mind asynchronously, through her book the Pearly Gates of Cyberspace. The book examines how a society’s relationship to and understanding of space will influence how it imagines itself—and, written in the late ‘90s, what that meant in the early days of the web. One look at the evolution of digital culture since soundly proves out her thesis. But more than that it’s a journey through art, science, math, history, and philosophy that only a truly interdisciplinary mind could imagine. Each realm of her expertise in itself would be impressive; from mathematics to physics to art, but it’s her ability to synthesize these across different modalities that separates her from the rest.

Grab your copy of Pearly Gates here!

Maybe the most obvious example of this intermixing is in the crochet coral reef project, which she co-founded with her sister Christine Wertheim. It’s simultaneously a large-scale participatory art project, a work of astounding environmental activism, and a fun, accessible way to teach the public about the basics of curved space—inviting participants to reconsider their ability to learn mathematical concepts. But this applies to so much of Margaret’s work—take her latest exploration into the history and concept of “dimensions.”

With the rise of the large deep learning models we see in contemporary generative AI, which rely on multidimensionality, it’s never been more important to understand this concept, and Margaret is without a doubt the thinker to take us there—not just because she’s an expansive enough mind to understand the concepts, but the generosity to frame them in an accessible way for the public to understand them.

A lot of people talk about the importance of making complex subjects accessible to the public, but Margaret walks the walk. And you get a taste of that in this conversation.

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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.

Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lia Halloran & Kip Thorne, Cherie Hu, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, and more.