ARTWORK by Murray Young
Most of these works are mathematical, dealing with fascinating, important and useful concepts; my hope is that these works stimulate an interest in those concepts yet can also be enjoyed by anyone who has no interest in Mathematics whatsoever. The artistic quality here is mediocre at best; I have known at least four people who are better artists than I am so this is not false modesty. The best part of these works are the ideas they play with, ideas to do with music, imagination, culture and philosophy as well as mathematics.
MONSTERS SET – 1. REDBEAST. August 31, 2016. 60.8 cm by 60.8 cm
This creature’s image is spread over four works and is composed of shapes generated by joining each of twenty-four vertices with all of the other vertices in an enormous polygon. This is called a wasserbeast and here is the following accompanying text:
The kindly wasserbeast terribly sad is
Her fierce reputation unfounded and unfair is.
(This is a stanza from ‘Jabberwocky’ by Lewis Carroll, with the word ‘Jabberwock’ replaced with the word ‘Wasserbeast’
Now what happens if one rearranges the images? In the original set of four at the top, exchange the upper left and the lower right, then exchange the upper right and the lower left. The text changes but it still makes sense:
Unfounded and unfair is her fierce reputation
Terribly sad is the kindly Wasserbeast.
The arrangement also creates a central grid displaying fourteen monstrous numbers positioned inside the fourteen shapes found in something called the Stomachion which was a puzzle created by Archimedes centuries ago. The Stomachion pieces can be rearranged to form a square in 17 152 different ways.
These are the numbers displayed here:
- 666 – The Number of the Beast (The Book of Revelation, Chapter 13 Verse 18 of the Christian Bible)
- 16900 – The number of possible combinations of characters generated by the German Enigma code machine during World War Two
- 17152 – The number of rearrangements of the Stomachion pieces
- 22388618 – The number of digits in the largest known Mersenne prime number, that is, a prime number that is one less than a power of two
- 44677236 – The number of digits in the largest known Perfect Number (i.e., a number that’s equal to the sum of its factor: 6, 28, 496, 8128 and so on)
- 18446744073709551615 – The number of transfers in the solution to the famous Tower of Brahma puzzle, that is, (2 to the 64th) minus one
- 43252003274489856000 – The possible states of a standard Rubik’s cube
- 354424848179261915075 – The 100th Fibonacci number
- 10 to the power 80000000000000000 – Archimedes’ estimate of the number of grains of sand it would take to fill the universe.
- Skewes’ Number, Avogadro’s Number and Graham’s Number
- A googolplexian – a googol is 10 to the power 100. A googolplex is 10 to the power one googol. A googolplexian is 10 to the power one googolplex.
- The Monster Group – with 10 to the 53 symmetries exising in 196883 dimensions, probably the most complex entity in Mathematics
- Aleph Null – the number of Natural Numbers (1, 2, 3 and so on)
- C – the number of Real Numbers (this is larger than Aleph Null !)
MONSTERS SET – 2. TODBEAST. August 26, 2018. 45.7 cm by 61 cm
The word for ‘death’ in German is der Tod. The image of this beast is formed out of the shapes generated by connecting every vertex of a twenty-four-sided polygon to every other vertex, just as the Redbeast was formed. The accompanying rectangles to the right and left at the bottom present examples of terrible and immense losses of life:
These rectangles have themselves been subdivided into a pattern known as Ko Shan which is the name of a butterfly wing design dating from 1617 China, a precursor of the tangram dissection pattern (see the gallery of tangram-related art pieces).
According to The Kidd 