axiomatic: the creative process in art and mathematics

process   creative team   events

Timea Tihanyi

Timea Tihanyi received a BFA in Ceramics from Massachusetts College of Art (1998) and an MFA in Ceramics from the University of Washington (2003). She also holds a Doctor of Medicine from Semmelweis University, Budapest, Hungary (1993).

Her work probes intuition and logic, the connection, and sometimes conflict, between the physical experience of the body and the cognitive experience of the mind. It invites direct participation and desires interaction.

She uses materials as sensory and sensual clues. Translucent sheets of paper pulp, elastic nylon membranes, bulging bladders of rubber, the softness of felted wool and the bony-white of unglazed porcelain recall the anatomy and physiology of the body. The materials, being shaped by forces of physics--gravity and time--being stretched, slumped, stacked or stitched together, reflect on the state of the physical body: an experience of strength and frailty, resistance and surrender, order and chaos.

Jayadev S. Athreya

Jayadev S. Athreya completed his PhD at the University of Chicago in 2006, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale and Princeton. He was a faculty member at the University of Illinois, and joined the University of Washington in 2015.

He studies the fluid boundary between structure and randomness. For example, in one moment a flock of birds appears to be a disorganized rabble, in the next, it coalesces into a highly ordered winged squadron. The central theme of his research has been detecting this boundary (when it exists); detecting the presence of structure in seemingly random systems; and vice-versa, detecting randomness in seemingly structured systems.

He is deeply interested in visualizations, animations, and fabrications of geometric and other mathematical concepts. He is the director of the Washington Experimental Mathematics Lab, a team of mathematical explorers including undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and community members.