This morning when I came in to the JMM I ran into a friend, who promptly said hello to Satyan Devadoss and made him drop all of his papers. He was delightful about the encounter as we helped him pick up everything. He was even more delightful a few hours later in the first MAA Contributed Paper Session on Mathematics and the Arts, when he and coauthor Diane Hoffoss presented their “Unfolding Humanity” project.
The $45,000, 6500 person-hour project was based on an idea from three University of San Diego undergraduates who had taken Devadoss’s fall 2018 geometry course. As Devadoss put it,
The nerdiness for all this comes for us as how do we build a large-scale sculpture based on unsolved mathematics?