So I’m here at the Gaudino talk, wishing all if you were here as well! Anyway, we must get Satyan Devadoss to come talk with us, not only because his area of study is topology (which we got a glimpse into with Julia.s paper and presentation today) but also because he, too, is obsessed with the visual display of information, and makes these beautiful drawings of strange four-dimensional objects folded through 5-dimensional space with flexible sides and other things that make my brain hurt. And he is fascinated with the idea of bringing art and mathematics together in such a way that both lead to greater understanding and discoveries in their own fields through the exploration of the other. As he says (and he and I have had this conversation previously as well), most of the time with artists and mathematicians come together, the mathematicians end of making bad art, and the artists end up presenting math that is 300 years old and thinking it’s new and cutting edge.

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