Full of Beauty: Day Two at Bridges

Today was full of beauty. Before starting this master's degree, I would have laughed if someone told me math was beautiful. Now I see it everywhere here, not just in the finished art but in the ideas themselves, and in the people who play with them.

             Beautiful food was part of my day as well!

The openness with which people here share ideas is part of that beauty too. I learn almost as much from listening to conversations between sessions as I do from the talks themselves. There is something enchanting about watching people think together, building on one another's ideas with genuine curiosity.

Nick Sayers (2026) talked about using math-based art for social justice, which didn't surprise me the way it might have previously; I already knew his work a little, from a course earlier this year. What struck me instead was something I'm only just starting to put words to: I think what's sometimes missing for me in math art is the feeling part. Maybe that's just how I move through the world. I always seem to come back to the feeling behind things, even in mathematics, apparently. I find myself wanting to know not only how a piece works or why an artist chose a particular process, but what made them fall in love with the idea in the first place. There's so much careful reasoning behind why a piece gets made, but I want to hear the feeling behind it too, and that's what I appreciated about Sayers' talk: he brought that sense of meaning and feeling alongside the mathematics.

He also talked about a photograph limiting the world to one little rectangle, and how he'd started making work that tried to hold something more panoramic instead. That pulled me straight back to Meurig Beynon's (2026) construals from yesterday: a photograph freezes a single rectangle, but everything that made that rectangle matter is missing from it, what the person behind the camera was feeling right then, the climate, the time of day, the place, how familiar or foreign it felt to be standing there at all. None of that survives the frame.

Later that morning, I met another participant while walking to the conference. When he learned that I teach young children, he told me about his flatmate, who had created projects he thought would appeal to children, and introduced us. One involved a PVC cylinder wrapped in mirrored film beside a flat, pixelated drawing that looks like nothing until the reflection transforms it into a complete image. My first thought was about my students. Could something like this become an invitation to play?

That same sense of curiosity seemed to run through the whole day. What kept striking me wasn't just the mathematics but how alive everyone's wonder was. Every presenter seemed genuinely delighted by the process of exploring an idea, and the audience met them with the same spirit, asking "what if?" almost as often as "how?"

Dave Whyte's (2026) talk on his gif art, Bees & Bombs, seemed to embody the kind of play I noticed all day. He doesn't start with an image he wants to create. Instead, he plays with different parameters and ideas from his "bag of tricks" until something surprises him, and then he follows that thread wherever it leads. I saw that same playful spirit in Kerry Mitchell (2026), serious in front of the room and clearly, underneath that, having enormous fun filling space with curves. Helena Verrill (2026) opened her session with the perfect joke: "Here is a Hilbert curve," she said, holding up what looked like nothing more than a solid black square. After enough iterations, a Hilbert curve fills the entire square. I immediately started thinking about my own students and how I might invite them to discover this idea through play, experimenting with curves and watching a space slowly fill.

The most playful part of the day wasn't a talk at all. Three of us got properly lost trying to find the cafeteria where the rest of the group was waiting, wandering through a building none of us understood. We found everyone eventually, and somewhere along the way something shifted, from feeling awkward and late to simply laughing about it. Then we all sat down together to read Tom Petsinis's (2026) Euler's Vision aloud. I played i, the imaginary number. My first attempt at post-secondary school was theatre, long before any of this math, and it was strange and wonderful to feel that old love show up again, tangled into this new one.

I think that's the thing, actually. The wonder is the beautiful part. Whyte nudging his parameters around until something catches his eye, Mitchell and Verrill filling space with curves just to see what happens, the mirrored cylinder revealing something unexpected, the three of us laughing our way lost through a building we didn't understand before we'd even sat down to read, all of it is the same small spark of wonder, just given room to grow.

And belonging turned out to be tangled up in that too, though not in the way I expected coming in. It isn't about already knowing the math or always knowing the right questions to ask. I am still finding my way into these conversations, still learning the language, and still figuring out where my voice fits.

But I am beginning to wonder if my place here might come from noticing something that feels important to me: the feeling behind the mathematics. I am drawn not only to the ideas themselves, but to the stories, emotions, and human experiences that surround them. Perhaps that is the perspective I bring—not as an artist or mathematician, but as a teacher who is always wondering how people connect with ideas and how children might discover that same sense of wonder.

I came into today still carrying some of yesterday's worry about whether I belong in a room like this. Maybe I don't need to earn a place by knowing enough already. Maybe belonging is also about bringing the questions, perspectives, and ways of seeing that are uniquely yours. And perhaps, over time, I will find my voice in this community—not by becoming someone else, but by offering what I already notice.

References

Beynon, M. (2026). Building bridges: Making sense of mathematics and art. Proceedings of Bridges 2026: Mathematics and the Arts, 21–28. URL

Mitchell, K. (2026). Creating art with space-filling curves. Proceedings of Bridges 2026: Mathematics and the Arts, Galway, Ireland. URL

Petsinis, T. (2026). Euler’s vision. Proceedings of Bridges 2026: Mathematics and the Arts. https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2026/bridges2026_Supplement_111.pdf

Sayers, N. (2026). Math-art with meaning: Explorations in artistic mathematics [Conference presentation]. Bridges 2026: Mathematics and the Arts, Galway, Ireland. URL

Verrill, H. (2026). Colour pooling on Hilbert curves. Proceedings of Bridges 2026: Mathematics and the Arts, Galway, Ireland. URL

Whyte, D. (2026). Bees & bombs: My gifs [Conference presentation]. Bridges 2026: Mathematics and the Arts, Galway, Ireland. URL