Viewing Response: Nick Sayers Interview

Stop 1 — "I'm not good at math"

One of the first moments that made me stop and think was Nick's comparison between people saying, "I'm not good at math" and people saying, "I'm not a good artist." We tend to reduce vast, complex fields to a single entry-level skill — arithmetic for math, drawing for art — and then decide we don't belong in either world. Monet didn't pass a realistic drawing test. So why do we assume mathematics belongs only to people who can calculate quickly? This reframing feels important both personally and in my own classroom. How many students have already closed a door on themselves before they've even seen what's behind it? Perhaps I can still be an artist!

Stop 2 — Polyhedron Garbage Bags

This project genuinely moved me. The idea that garbage bags — limp, ugly, ordinary — can become Archimedean (I had to look those up) and Platonic solids the moment wind moves through them is such a powerful metaphor. The math is already there in the structure, but it takes action, movement, energy to reveal it. I loved the equation he offered: 10 litres × 5 shapes × 0 contents. These perfect geometric forms contain nothing, and yet they become something extraordinary. As a teacher, this makes me think about how we can create conditions where the math reveals itself through doing, rather than just describing it from the front of a room. I wonder what it would look like to strip an activity down to its simplest possible form and let the structure do the work?

Stop 3 — Collaboration and the Unplanned

Several moments in the interview touched on how Nick doesn't always have the end in mind when he begins a project — and how bringing work to the public, to schools, to festivals, opens it up to new directions. The camera obscura project is a perfect example: it came together partly through a collaboration with an optician father of his daughter's classmate. That's math and art connecting people, not just ideas. This reminded me of when I presented at the SSHRC grant event in Kelowna and an elder spoke about a concept in the Syilx language — one I can only approximate in English as "igniting the spark" — the idea that bringing something unfinished into contact with others can generate something neither party could have reached alone. As a teacher, this gives me permission to not have everything figured out before I bring it to students. Their input is part of the design.

Stop 4 — The Aral Sea and the Powers of Ten

I wasn't expecting to be floored by an environmental moment in a math-art interview, but the Aral Sea stopped me cold. Seeing what damming did to an entire sea — a ship graveyard where water used to be — is one of those images that reframes your sense of scale and consequence instantly. Combined with his reference to the Powers of Ten film, there's something here about math as a tool for seeing at scales we can't otherwise perceive. It's yet another reminder that data and geometry can carry moral and emotional weight — that numbers aren't neutral.

What does Nick's work offer me as a teacher?

My biggest takeaway might be the most personal one: how important it is to find your passion and let it drive your practice. Nick's projects span geometry, optics, environmental science, performance, and public education — and what holds them together isn't a curriculum, it's genuine curiosity and delight. As a teacher, I want to bring that same feeling into the classroom — the sense that something exists because I couldn't stop thinking about it. The pedal spirographs, the pinhole camera, the bicycle cog drawings — these aren't illustrations of math concepts. They are math, alive and in motion.

Questions for Nick:

When you bring projects to schools, how do you handle the tension between open-ended exploration and curriculum expectations? And with the bicycle cog drawing project — I would have loved to hear more about how students responded and what mathematical conversations came out of it. Did anything surprise you?

I would be happy to share both this post and my questions with Nick if he has time to respond.