An update on the monthly DMAM (Dance, Movement Arts and Mathematics) online meeting: next one is Sunday March 15, and you are invited!

Hi all. Here's a repost from earlier in February about the next DMAM meeting, so that those who might be interested in joining in on the March 15 meeting (10:30 am - noon Vancouver time) can join:

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Hello everyone! A note that Sunday March 15 (update), 10:30 AM- 12 noon Pacific Time, everyone in our class is

invited to join in (with optional participation) in the monthly DMAM (Dance, Mathematics and Movement) international online group! The details, including the Zoom link, are below. Hope that some of us will be able to attend and participate.

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Our next Zoom meeting of the Dance, Movement Arts, and Mathematics group is Sunday, March 15, 10:30 AM PST (California time). 

Last time, Manuela Manetta and Lori Teague who teach Mathematics and Dance respectively at Emory University in Atlanta, presented about their combining of their disciplines in courses at Emory. I found it very inspiring and interesting to see how they were teaching differential equations and other undergraduate-level advanced math topics through dance, with a collaboration between a professor of dance and a professor of math!

At the March 15 meeting, one of the presentations will be by Jenny Ludwigs, a PhD student at Stockholm University in Sweden. Jenny has a background in information technology, web development and engineering as well as in mathematics education, and she also dances ballet as an interest. She will be talking about her in-progress PhD research proposal, that brings together haptics (tangible computer interactions) with math and possibly dance. It's sure to be interesting!


Link for the March 15 meeting is below.


Karl Schaffer writes: For those planning to go to the Bridges Galway Math and Arts Conference this coming summer, DMAM people have been approved to again present a session of short dance and math activities on Bridges Family Day. If you are interested in helping plan this event please get in touch with me. We need to look over applications and plan the approximately two hour event (assuming it will be about the same length as last year's session.)


Topic: DMAM Meeting Sunday, March 15, 2026, 10:30 AM PST (California time)
Time: This is a recurring meeting.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://fhda-edu.zoom.us/j/85347919727?pwd=nVljsKtyIp8S3wp3idAv21hhh2wdLu.1
Meeting ID: 853 4791 9727
Passcode: 332311

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DMAM has an exciting and helpful, always-ongoing, never-completed project: creating a bibliography and filmography of resources around math, movement arts and dance. Here is a link to a pdf of this ever-evolving living document.

Follow-up from our Feb 25 class: Exploring mathematical poetry slides, Math-Art Manifesto meeting information

 Hi everyone! I am so thrilled with the great work our class did collectively on drafting our own starting
points for our Math-Art Manifestos -- and the fun Fib/ Hemachandra poems people wrote in just five minutes. Please feel free to post your Fib poem to the class blog or your personal blog for the course, and to write some more if you feel moved to do so!

Here is the link to the slides on exploring mathematical poetry that we dipped into yesterday evening, FYI.

UPDATE: Dr. Fumiko Futamura from Southwestern University has let me know that the next Math Art Manifesto Zoom meeting will be Sunday, March 29, from 9:00- 10:30 AM Vancouver time. And everyone in our class is welcome to join in! (I highly recommend it -- it is a fascinating discussion with very interesting people.)

Two questions for you -- perhaps you can answer in the comments below:

1) Is it OK for me to send Fumiko your email to add to the email list for the Math Art Manifesto meetings?

2) Are you OK with me sharing the draft Math Art Manifesto you worked on with Fumiko and the Manifesto group? (They are mostly Bridges Math Art people who have been working together on this since last summer).

Math/Art Fib Poem

Math

Art

Confused

What is it?

We ask each other

I truly have no idea

Creating a Math/Art Manifesto - Anna, Amy, Rosmy

 A Math/Art Manifesto: Birthing a Nexus of Math/Art

“Mathematics counts when it helps us make meaning 

Art counts when it helps us experience that meaning with our whole selves. “

Not anymore. We must rewrite history. 

Daughters, mothers, classmates, friends, math educators

- together, we forge a new nexus where love, math, and art converge.

Who decides what counts as mathematical?

Who decides what counts as art? 

We build a bridge between worlds that have long kept apart. 

We cross borders created by those before us. 

We create a nexus of mathematics and art 

We refuse separation and only seek connection

If mathematics is only symbols on a page, 

We miss the symmetry in spiritual traditions

The ratios in home-cooked meals

The intricate patterns in fiber arts

If art is only a painting in a gallery,

We miss the elegance of a proof

The composition of a graph 

The dance of balance and variation.

We burn the rigid definitions that separate rigor and beauty,

Logic from intuition 

Culture from calculation 

What counts as math is not limited to what is timed or tested 

What counts as art is not limited to what is framed or funded 

We find math/art in lived practice: 

• A dancer tracing arcs in sand is exploring transformation

• A community weaving willow is composing algorithms

• A child stacking blocks is experiencing geometry 

• A musician scoring concertos is probing proportions 

In reflexivity, we admit:

definitions are never innocent

They include and exclude. 

They elevate some by silencing others. 

So we widen the frame.

We mix a new palette. 

Guided by an ethos of love, 

we humanize mathematics and arts 

We honor the invisible mathematics, the embodied, cultural, and everyday mathematics 

We recognize art in reasoning and reasoning in art 

We treat proof as a creative act and critique as analytical care. 

What counts is not determined by gatekeepers

- we refuse to repeat their exclusions 

Mathematics/art counts when it helps us make meaning collectively,

and that meaning moves humanity forward towards liberation.

They count when they awaken us- 

to pattern and presence

to structure and story,

to each other. 

And we count every soul as a maker, thinker, and explorer at our shared horizon.

Math/Art Manifesto - Sarah, Sushi, Clementina, and Lee

Five mathematicians gathered on a rainy day, embracing the uncertainty of the weather with a singular mission: spread the gospel of math/art. The presented manifesto must travel beyond the four walls, across the landscapes, uneven terrains, and boundaries that academia has forced upon us.

Math/Art Manifesto

1) We must consider math as potential art.

2) It’s a new approach to inviting people into historically exclusive disciplines.

3) We must consider art as potentially mathematical.

Connections between Maths, Arts, and other disciplines.

4) We must consider math/art as a form of creative expression.

5) AI ≠ math/art

6) We must not restrict where art exists or is experienced (in non-AI the realm).

7) We must not restrict what art can be made from (materials).

8) We must not restrict art to academia.

9) We must give credit (platform, resources) to the communities who created or continue to practice the art.

10) The “we” doesn’t exist without the Indigenous and other marginalized community.

11)People have the freedom to claim the meaning, value, and truth of math and art.

12) We must be open to new ways of thinking and creating math and art forms.

13) We don’t believe in standardization.

Week 8: A focus on mathematical novels, poetry and other literature

Hello everyone! I hope that everyone is doing OK, with many
of our group coming down with colds and
flu... Please take good care, avoid getting sick, and if you are already feeling poorly, get well soon!

Here is our 'everything sheet' for our next week's classes, with a focus on mathematics, poetry, novels and kids' books. Hope you enjoy it!

We will be having Vancouver mathematics professor and mathematical poet Lisa Lajeunesse as our guest speaker in class in the upcoming weeks too! Looking forward to her presentation and activities with us very much.

PS: In case we have time to work with these, here are PDFs of the chapters of the excellent kids/young adult math novel, The Number Devil:

Folder of PDFs of chapters

And here is Mike Naylor's wonderful, simple mathematical poem (only two distinct words and eight short lines):

Hero, Run!

Hero, hero, hero,

Hero, hero, run!

Hero, run, hero -- 

Hero, run, run!

Run, hero, hero

Run, hero, run!

Run, run, hero --

Run, run, run!

Welcome to our Feb 18 asychronous class!

 Hello everyone, and happy Lunar New Year! 

Guest speaker interview viewing, substituting for our in-person class today:

This week I recorded an interview with mathematical/ STEAM artist, Nick Sayers, coming to us from Brighton in the UK. It's almost two hours long (1:55), and is centred on a slide presentation of Nick's many, ingenious science and mathematical art projects. Here's the link to the interview video.

Nick Sayers brings most of his artwork to public education venues including schools and universities, arts and maker festivals, music fests, and international events. In his talk, he traces the process of designing and developing these math/ art/ science projects, and I think the process may be quite informative for you as you begin to design your own math/ art educational projects.

So for this week's class, please do the following, by Sunday February 22 at midnight:

1. Watch the full video, and take some notes on the things that make you think, connect, question, remember and ask questions. It would be helpful to note the time code at each of these, so that you can refer to them in your writing.
2. From these, choose 3 or 4 'stops' to write about in your post on your viewing. 
3. Also, please think about and respond to this question:
   What does this artist's work offer you in terms of understanding math-art connections, and what does it offer you as a math or science teacher?
4. If you have questions you'd like to ask Nick Sayers, please add them at the end of your post.
5. Let me know if you'd like to share your post and/or your questions with the artist, and I will email him whatever people would like to share. He may be able to respond if he has time!

Readings for this week:

We also have our regular readings for the week, and you should post and respond to your reading group's posts as we usually do!

 

Here are our three readings for this week, centred on the idea of what it means to be a mathematical artist. This is a hot topic in the Bridges Math and Art community at the moment, initiated by the George Hart article (reading #1) from the AMA Notes recently which suggested the idea of a Math/ Art manifesto. (A group of us affiliated with Bridges are working on that and hashing out these big ideas now!)

1. George Hart. (2024). What Can We Say About “Math/Art”?. Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 71(4).
   
   
2. Choose one of these two articles: Alison G. Martin. (2015, August). A basketmaker’s approach to structural morphology. In Proceedings of IASS Annual Symposia (Vol. 2015, No. 29, pp. 1-8). International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS). 
   
   OR Chronaki et al (2025). Circular movements of healing with maths, arts and craft: Reimagining disciplinary transversals for learning. In Proceedings of MACAS 2025, University of Moncton, NB.
    
3. Fumiko Futamuro. (2025). Writing a mathematical art manifesto. In Bridges 2025 Archive, Eindhoven, NL, 589-594.

Enjoy! And looking forward to seeing you back in person next week (Wed. Feb. 25)

A clarification on some details about your annotated bibliography

Hehehe...this can sometimes have a certain validity!

Hi all! I had some questions about some of the details about the annotated bibliography for your
culminating project. Here are some answers -- hope they are helpful! And please feel free to get in touch with any further questions about anything in the course.

In a previous course, I had grad students focus on tracing backwards and forwards through the reference lists of articles used in a bibliography, with the aim of figuring out which were the foundational writings in the field.

This annotated bibliography has a different focus -- even though I did mention tracing backwards and forward via reference lists.

• For this project, the articles do not have to be connected to one another through referencing. (That was just suggested as a possible strategy for getting to the most foundational works within a certain academic strand of research…) 
  
  
• I encourage you to choose the articles, book chapters, and even a website or video if appropriate, that best supports your work. 
  
  
• Many of these might be fairly recent (within the past 10-15 years), but some may also be older works. 

 Try to get a good scan of the field, and then select the things that really support what you’re planning to do, and say why in your annotations.

 

IMPORTANT: Our Wednesday February 18 class will be virtual and asynchronous!!

 Hello everyone, and happy Lunar New Year (and Vietnamese New Year, and ...)!

I recently learned that many people in our class will not be able to attend our class in person, or even via Zoom, this coming Wednesday, because of important family commitments, many of them connected with Lunar New Year.

So here's the alternative plan!

• This week I will be doing a recorded one hour Zoom interview with an interesting and notable mathematical artist and public educator from the UK, Nick Sayers
• I will post a link to the video of the interview on our class blog next Wednesday February 18 (as well as the readings, etc. to prepare for our February 25 class).
  
  
  

Your asynchronous class tasks: 

1. Watch the video interview between Wednesday Feb 18 and Saturday Feb 21.
2. Make a separate post on your blog in the form of a 'letter to Nick Sayers', where you write about what you take away from the interview, two or three 'stops' you had while watching it, and a question you would like to ask him about the relationship between mathematics and the arts (and education).
3. Visit at least one other classmate's reflective blog post about the interview, and leave a comment. (Please first choose a classmate who has not yet received a comment!)
4. I will copy everyone's letters and comments into a document and email it to Nick Sayers next week -- and if he has time, he may reply!

Remember that you will also be doing next week's readings and your usual reading group responses to these as well!

An invitation to join in on the Dance, Movement Arts and Mathematics online group this Sunday February 15

 

Hello everyone! A note that Sunday Feb 15, 10:30 AM- 12 noon Pacific Time, everyone in our class is

invited to join in (with optional participation) in the monthly DMAM (Dance, Mathematics and Movement) international online group! The details, including the Zoom link, are below. Hope that some of us will be able to attend and participate.

******************

Our next Zoom meeting of the Dance, Movement Arts, and Mathematics group is Sunday, Feb. 15, 10:30 AM PST (California time). Manuela Manetta and Lori Teague who teach Mathematics and Dance respectively at Emory University in Atlanta have offered to present about their combining of their disciplines in courses at Emory.


Link for the Feb. 15th meeting is below.


At the last meeting last month Scott Kim gave an introduction to how to draw hypercubes in the plane as an introduction to a large string figure of a 4D hypercuve we plan to create at the Gathering for Gardner conference in San Francisco this month. Also January Wolodarsky introduced us to Tuedon Ariri and Arthur Morel Van Hyfte who pesented about their acrobatic dance company's beautiful performance work. For those who could not make it the last meeting Tuedon has sent us this link to their slides from their presentation.

For those planning to go to the Bridges Galway Math and Arts Conference this coming summer we have been approved to again present a session of short dance and math activities on Bridges Family Day. If you are interested in helping plan this event please get in touch with me. We need to look over applications and plan the approximately two hour event (assuming it will be about the same length as last year's session.)


Karl Schaffer


Topic: DMAM Meeting Sunday, Feb. 15, 2026, 10:30 AM PST (California time)
Time: This is a recurring meeting.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://fhda-edu.zoom.us/j/85347919727?pwd=nVljsKtyIp8S3wp3idAv21hhh2wdLu.1
Meeting ID: 853 4791 9727
Passcode: 332311

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DMAM has an exciting and helpful, always-ongoing, never-completed project: creating a bibliography and filmography of resources around math, movement arts and dance. Here is a link to a pdf of this ever-evolving living document.

Week 6: Math, dance, movement and film --Introduction, viewings, activities, readings

  

Hello everyone! Here is the link to this week's resources and activities, mostly focused on teaching mathematics through dance and movement.

A note that Sunday Feb 15, 10:30 AM- 12 noon Pacific Time, everyone in our class is invited to join in with optional participation in DMAM (Dance, Mathematics and Movement) international online group! I will post more details, including the Zoom link, on the class blog before the weekend. Hope that some of us will be able to attend and participate!

DMAM has an exciting and helpful, always-ongoing, never-completed project: creating a bibliography and filmography of resources around math, movement arts and dance. Here is a link to a pdf of this ever-evolving living document.

How to submit your project outline & annotated bibliography

  

Hello everyone! Here are instructions on how to submit your annotated bibliography and brief project outline (title, name(s) of those working on it, short description of you topic and how you plan to research, design and try out your ideas):

You should post these on your personal blog for the course by midnight on the due date, Wednesday February 18.

If you are working with a partner, both of you should post (the same) outline and annotated bibliography on your individual blogs.

Looking forward to reading about your exciting project ideas, and giving you some feedback to help guide next steps!

EDIT: Your draft project is now due one week later, on March 18!!

A free online session on "Math and Juggling" from the Museum of Math (MoMATH), NYC, Monday March 2, 3:30-4:30 PM Vancouver time

Dear MoMath friends, 

MoMath’s 2025–2026 Visiting Professor Dr. Arthur Benjamin curates a monthly dive into the many ways mathematics inspires — and hides inside — film, theater, music, magic, juggling, and more. Each session features an hour-long conversation with Art and special guests. Some months you’ll watch the selected movie or performance on your own, then join a lively discussion; other months the performer will appear live, ready to share insights and answer questions.

Discover how creative minds weave math into stories, staging, and spectacle, and leave with fresh ways to see the connections between performance and mathematics.

Join Visiting Professor Dr. Arthur Benjamin for an evening of Starring Math, featuring Mathematics and Juggling

with Colin Wright — on Monday, March 2, from 6:30 pm to 7:30 pm ET (online).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZMR2h93X0k

Note that this will be 3:30-4:30 Pacific Time!

No advance viewing is necessary for this special Starring Math session.

Register for free at momath.org/starring.

Regards,
National Museum of MathematicsView upcoming events at momath.org/calendar
Support MoMath at momath.org/contribute
(212) 542-0566

225 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
United States

A bit more detail about the annotated bibliography for the culminating course project

 

I've had some questions about the details of the annotated bibliography for the culminating project outline due in early February. It's great that people are asking -- and if a few people have a question, chances are that others do too, so please feel free to email me with any questions about the course!

Here are some details about the annotated bibliography:

• There's no particular word count for the annotated bibliography, but there is a certain number of items you are asked to include. (I believe it's 5-10 items -- academic and professional articles, websites, videos, etc.) if you're working individually, and 10-20 items if you're working with a partner (recommended if you are able to make that work).
• That means that you will need to look at, skim or read about 20 - 30 items, and select the best and most helpful ones for you from that list!
• Once you have read and viewed these selected items in more detail, your annotations should be 1-2 sentences each, in italics, under each item, offering a brief summary and then the reasons why you found the article, video, etc. particularly intriguing and helpful in understanding your topic.
• Note that the annotated bibliography items should *NOT* be course readings or viewings -- so that you explore beyond the required materials from the course!

I hope that helps you get started, and I will be happy to add further details in response to any questions you raise! We'll also take a few minutes at the start of our February 11 class to go over some of the ways to get started with a lit review search.

Week 5: Integrating mathematics and embodied, arts-based & outdoors inquiry activities

 Here is the link to this week's introduction, viewings, activities, and readings! I hope you will find inspiration and practical ideas here as you develop your culminating course project outline for next week.

Our new reading groups for the next four weeks (Jan 28 - Mar 3)

 Hi everyone! A reminder that we've switched up our reading groups so that everyone gets a chance to interact with many other people in the class in this way. Here are the new reading groups for this next month:

(i) Amy, Aun, Sarah

(ii) Anna, Kabula, Clementina

(iii) Lee, Sushi, Rosmy

We'll plan to switch things up one more time for the last four weeks of the course as well.

Sushi Roy: “Unrestricted” Math, from Bridges to Rural Households

Link to the article I chose: Kristóf Fenyvesis (2016). Bridges: A world community for mathematical art.

The article follows the story of Bridges as a deliberately “unrestricted” mathematical community, one that treats mathematics less like a gated subject and more like a shared cultural practice you can make, see, and experience (Fenyvesi, 2016). Rather than centering only formal research and university departments, Fenyvesi frames “mathematical community” broadly, so student groups, extracurricular spaces, exhibitions, workshops, and playful making all count as legitimate mathematical life (Fenyvesi, 2016). Bridges becomes his main example: a moving, global gathering where mathematicians, artists, educators, students, and families meet through talks, installations, hands-on workshops, performances, and collaborative builds, with the point being that math can travel through multiple “languages,” including art (Fenyvesi, 2016). He also shows the behind-the-scenes tension that comes with growth: as Bridges expanded, it had to balance openness with peer review and credibility across disciplines without losing the “come as you are” energy that made it special in the first place (Fenyvesi, 2016).

One idea that made me stop was the claim (via Schattschneider) that “mathematical ideas can be taught through art”(as cited in Fenyvesi, 2016, p. 36). That line landed for me because it names something I’ve been circling for a while: I never developed a relationship with mathematics that felt safe or relatable. The version of math I met most often was abstract, performance-heavy, and strangely disconnected from the world, so “math” became synonymous with fear instead of curiosity. Reading this alongside what I’m learning through developmental and neuroscience-informed work made the connection feel even sharper. A lot of the mathematical confidence we associate with “being good at math” is tied up with early experiences that build spatial reasoning, patterning, and comfort with puzzles and manipulation (Levine et al., 2012). If that foundation feels shaky, then school math can start to look like a locked door. And honestly, my own experience fits that: I’ve always found spatial tasks hard, like mentally rotating objects or “seeing” transformations, and I’ve often noticed that people who love math seem to have an imaginative, visual relationship with space that I don’t default to.

That said, the article also helped me reframe this in a way that supports the direction I’m already taking in my thesis. If mathematical ideas can be taught through art (as cited in Fenyvesi, 2016, p. 36), then math doesn’t have to be introduced as a cold, symbolic system first. It can begin as movement, pattern, design, story, rhythm, craft, and problem-solving that is anchored in everyday life, and that is exactly why STEAM-style interventions that include arts and contextualized content matter. In other words, the goal isn’t to “make math fun” as a superficial add-on; it’s to widen the entry points so children can build the underlying competencies, confidence, and meaning-making that later school math depends on (Levine et al., 2012). For me, this is also a subtle equity argument: if early spatial play and puzzle-rich environments shape later trajectories, then access to those experiences becomes part of how opportunity gets distributed, long before anyone is taking algebra seriously (Levine et al., 2012).

My second stop was reading about Reza Sarhangi and the intellectual roots that shaped Bridges (Fenyvesi, 2016, p. 27). It felt almost comically timely because we were literally talking about Persian carpets in class, and then here’s the article pointing toward Persian and Islamic geometric traditions as living examples of mathematical thinking embedded in decorative arts and craft lineages (Fenyvesi, 2016). It made me think about how easily certain mathematical practices get labeled as “culture” or “decoration” instead of recognized as sophisticated knowledge. In colonized ways of categorizing knowledge, whose pattern systems count as mathematics, and whose get treated as aesthetic ornament? The article nudged me to see Bridges not just as a conference but as a kind of knowledge-politics project: it legitimizes forms of mathematical work that don’t always fit the Western academic pipeline, including maker traditions and visual, embodied, and design-based ways of knowing (Fenyvesi, 2016).

So here’s the question I’m left sitting with: When we say “unrestricted” mathematical community, unrestricted for whom? What would it take for school systems to recognize craft-based traditions (like Persian decorative arts, textiles, or local making practices) as mathematics rather than as “art” that is separate from “real” math, and how might that shift who gets to feel capable of belonging in mathematics (Fenyvesi, 2016)?

I’m also adding a few photos from my own research here, because I’ve been trying to document what “math” looks like in low-income rural households when nobody is calling it math. And honestly, I do think these count. If mathematics is about working with quantity, space, structure, and relationships, then a lot of everyday household activity is already doing mathematical work: estimating and allocating resources, measuring without formal tools, planning sequences of steps, using spatial reasoning to fit, stack, store, route, and build, and constantly optimizing effort, time, and materials. What changes is not whether math is present, but whether it gets recognized as legitimate mathematical thinking. That’s why the idea of an “unrestricted” mathematical community matters to me. It makes room for the possibility that these photos are not “cute examples” beside real math, but evidence that mathematical reasoning is already alive and distributed across daily life, long before school ever names it (Fenyvesi, 2016).

References: 

Fenyvesi, K. (2016). Bridges: A world community for mathematical art. The Mathematical Intelligencer, 38(2), 35–45. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00283-016-9630-9

Levine, S. C., Ratliff, K. R., Huttenlocher, J., & Cannon, J. (2012). Early puzzle play: A predictor of preschoolers’ spatial transformation skill. Developmental Psychology, 48(2), 530–542. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0025913