Mark McCombs, an exhibiting artist and professor in the Department of Mathematics, combines math, fractals and origami to create unique paper sculptures and 2D images. McCombs is restructuring the first-year seminar he teaches to reflect what he learned while exhibiting his art in Stockholm, Sweden last summer.
Staff writer Mary Mac Porter talked to McCombs about the similarities between literature and mathematics and how he’s combining numbers and art in unique ways to attract math-adverse students to the subject.
Read the entire article here.
Our very own, Mark McCombs, was featured in the University Gazette!
“I want to try to help people believe that math isn’t just numbers. Math is a way of interacting with your environment,” McCombs said.
When you take a look at Mark McCombs’ artwork, be sure to consider the mathematical equations behind them. The swirling pieces of paper and repeating designs in this mathematics teaching professor’s art is a study in mathematical symmetry. Math and art may appear to be at different ends of the educational spectrum, but to McCombs and his students, they couldn’t be more connected.
McCombs works mainly in modular origami, which consists of smaller paper shapes that can be combined to create one complete sculpture. He also uses the Ultra Fractal software application to produce fractal images, geometric shapes that contain infinitely many copies of themselves no matter how many times you zoom in.
Read the full article here.
Liquidambar Studio of Art will be featuring 3D art from our very own Mark McCombs! His art will be featured from June 2 to July 28th. Please join Mark for the opening night on June 2, from 2:00 – 4:00 pm! Liquidambar Studio of Art, 80 Hillsboro Street, Pittsboro, NC.
Click here for more information
Jason Metcalfe, professor of mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has received the 2019 Faculty Award for Excellence in Doctoral Mentoring.
With this annual award, The Graduate School recognizes a faculty member who: encourages students to establish their own record of scholarly activity or performance, provides a supportive environment that facilitates the development of best performance and talents from individual graduate students, and achieves a successful record of graduate degree completion among the students they have advised.
Congratulations, Jason, on this outstanding honor!
To read the full article, please click here.
In his youth, Boyce Griffith was writing computer programs before he could drive a car. Now a UNC mathematician, he creates computational models of the human heart to improve the prediction and treatment of cardiac diseases. Click here to read the entire article:
https://endeavors.unc.edu/cardiac-computation/
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