Musings on Embodied Mathematics

STEAM artist Nick Sayers works squarely in the lineage of Leonardo da Vinci. Like Leonardo, he makes art by human hand — but his hand moves through gears, chains, and recycled bicycle parts. His machine-artworks do not merely depict geometry; they enact it. Ratio becomes rhythm. Constraint becomes curve. Watching one of his bicycle-driven spirograph constructions in motion feels less like observing a calculation and more like witnessing choreography. He calls it busker ballet. The phrase is exact. Geometry unfolds in time. Nick’s work satisfies, almost defiantly, the demand that art be physically made directly by a human hand. His environmental and social commitments are not decoration; they are structural, preferring reuse to waste, r epair to consumerism. His  math-informed practice appears grounded in social responsibility. But this raises a question for mathematics itself.  Must mathematics also be physically made by a human hand to be true to be genuine? If we demanded th...

My project is titled “Phylicia’s Paradox” . It is a curricular + pedagogical design for a community learning experience on the mathematics of recommender systems , designed for a general, intergenerational audience and intended to run at the Black-led Black Creek Community Farm in Toronto . Recommender systems quietly shape what people watch, hear, buy, and believe.  The core problem the project addresses  is that  many people experience them as “magic” or manipulation because the underlying math is invisible. The workshop is designed to make the math legible through the body and senses, using an explicit learning arc: Reading  (representation → similarity → ranking → feedback loops) and Writing  (changing signals, weights, constraints, and success metrics). In the detailed outline that you can download, I describe deliverables and how I will design and try out the workshop. The deliverables include a facilitator guide, participant handouts (including low-tex...

In their article, “Dancing teachers into being with a garden, or how to swing or parkour the strict grid of schooling,” Susan Gerofsky and Julia Ostertag show how grids are everywhere in education. It is so ubiquitous it can become invisible: tiled floors, rows of desks, schedules, worksheets, tables, rubrics, gradebooks. “Grid thinking” supports a certain kind of productivity, but it also limits administrative imagination—restricting learning to parceled boxes, slicing time into units, and flattening the complexities of identity, interest, and curiosity into prefab categories. The article’s best move is that it doesn’t demand we “escape” the grid. Instead, the authors suggest learning to be beside it; like jazz swing beside a strict beat. Swing doesn’t abolish discipline; it leans on it: chord progression, harmony, tempo. The point isn’t to erase constraints, but to cultivate ways of moving through them that leave room for breath, surprise, and embodied presence. Think, for example, ...