Pi Day came and went. March 14 has become known as Pi Day for math enthusiasts because of its relation to the math constant of the same name, which is 3.14, the first three numbers you get by dividing the circumference of a circle by its diameter.
If you think of our calendar as a cyclical element of time, then you can conceivably consider this a preview to next year’s Pi Day. Or is that a stretch? No matter, there are still some echoes of pi left, and you can take them in at Shephard Hall in the Santa Maria Public Library.
Artist Fred Ventura, who has a Ph.D. in education, is also the director of ARTS Obispo. He celebrated the day with a series of events in both Santa Maria and San Luis Obispo County. In San Luis Obispo, there’s “Pi Art: A Celebration of Art and Mathematics” at ARTS Obispo, and in Santa Maria, Ventura led library visitors in a presentation of the marriage of math and art.
“It’s kind of a zany holiday,” he said. “My interest in it is really to promote mathematical and scientific thinking in the world.”
So to snuff out fantastical, illogical, and superstitious thinking, Ventura likes to come up with ways to fuse the logical thinking of math with the creativity of art. Last year, he hosted a party to celebrate Pi Day and invited a bunch of software engineers, mathematicians, and even a few rocket scientists—as well as some artists. The charge was to come up with an hors d’oeuvre that represents pi.
“There were a lot of people asking, ‘How am I going to do this?’ when really anything round would do it,” Ventura said.
Ventura brought his scientific thinking to folks at the Santa Maria Library on Pi Day, proving art and math do indeed mix. Early pieces considered art, such as cave drawings, were often used to express numbers.
“If there were five deer, they were trying to convey that we saw this many deer on our hunt,” Ventura said.
He explained that an early Babylonian inscription refers to the square root of 2, which relates to pi because it’s a non-algebraic number.
The Greeks considered the proportion of the Golden Rectangle, a 1.6-to-1 ratio, as the essence of beauty and used it in much of their architecture. It was Greek philosopher Pythagoras who proved the Golden Section was the basis for the proportion of the human figure. He showed that the human body is built with each part in a definite Golden Proportion to all other parts.
During the Renaissance, people knew the concept as the Divine Proportion and used it to express beauty and balance in the design of art. In modern times, that same concept can be seen in the works of Piet Mondrian and M.C. Escher.
Ventura’s own fascination with math comes from his background as a math teacher in the Conejo Valley many years ago. He then taught the application of computer in education at Cal Lutheran. At that time, he combined the two practices and started a software company that developed mathematic software that visually conveyed math concepts.
Ventura’s company also developed software that would help teachers with another standard tool of teaching. When many teachers stopped using compassing for fear of legal issues that could arise if a student was injured by the sharp pointy end, Ventura came up with a program that could teach the same concept—minus the potential for accidental punctures.
“I invented software tools that work the same way. So you can use your computer screen and mouse, and you can—very safely—use a compass and straight edge,” Ventura said, with a bit of chuckle.
These days, Ventura is working to get people to see the art in math. Or to see the math in art, depending on what side of the brain they prefer to use. Ventura uses tessellations, fractals, and geometric constructions to get that message across.
Pioneered by M.C. Escher (who does not produce rap albums), tessellations are designs that can fill a page without gaps or overlapping. Fractals are a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts with each part becoming a reduced copy of the whole.
Nature boasts examples of fractals in clouds, snowflakes, and crystals. The Shephard Hall Gallery boasts 18 pieces of Ventura’s mathematical works of art, on display throughout March.
Arts Editor Shelly Cone was told she has the perfect math name, but ironically she’s afraid of numbers. She can be contacted at scone@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 18-25, 2010.