or The American Experience, I was insistently
drawn across campus. Into the arts buildings I’d
go, an alien spy from another planet. There I’d
observe strange things like the students’ rapture in a visiting lecture by the subversive social
commentator Vito Acconci, a radically creative
artist of the time whose work was designed to
shock and provoke one to ask questions such
as: What is art? With answers such as: Masturbation in the gallery! Picking up his mail! The
students were over the moon. I was not.
just walked into the class on the first day, held
up such a shell and proceeded in silence to draw
the three axes, the coordinates, and spiral generating equation on the board and thus explain
how math could be used to described the shell,
everything would have been different—at least
for me. Today thanks to Hans Meinhardt’s
book, The Algorithmic Beauty of Sea Shells (1995),
amongst other wonderful sources, this is a normal thing to do if one is lucky enough to have a
creative math teacher.
One Friday afternoon near the end of my senior year, in another lecture much less exciting
than Acconci’s, I experienced one of those moments in life when one suddenly finds oneself
at a crossroad if one is open to the power of a
pivotal life shifting image. I remember the time
exactly, it was 4:45 pm. I was sitting in the back
row of the sparsely attended visiting lecture,
given by a sweet and portly old grey professor
on, ironically, how art education in America was
going extinct. Bored, I looked down at my feet.
There in The Daily Texan a savage looking professor called Lawrence Gilbert, was looking at
me. He was standing in a jungle with a butterfly
net trident-like in hand. It caught my attention
instantly. I read the article fast, jumped up, tore
out the back of the building and ran up along
the creek, across campus and over to the zoology building.
Suddenly it all seemed so backwards. If we
were taught somehow to appreciate the big picture and the patterns first, I thought, the beauty and the complexity, the process, and then to
break it down and learn the basics, getting from
biology and chemistry to organic chemistry
and on to biochemistry, it all would have been
so much easier. Why? Because we would know
where we were going and to what end, how the
small details fit into the whole. It came to me
then that as with the shell and mathematics, as
in the more advanced scientific worlds of theoretical conchology and pattern formation in
Lepidoptera that have subsequently been advanced since the early 1980s, that such information is so fascinating, so utterly compelling, that
I feel perhaps the same passion that religious
people do for practicing and spreading their
beliefs. What that conch shell does for math, I
would like