Course Description: Snowflakes, flower petals, the spiral arms of a galaxy, waves and dunes, the stripes on a tiger-all are examples of naturally occurring patterns. While a beautiful pattern appeals to the aesthetic side of our brains, it also begs the question of whether we can recreate such artful designs. Hence, there is a motivation to understand beauty with logic.
Mathematics provides us with tools to characterize patterns, and physics teaches us how to understand the emergence of patterns. This course will help you learn some selected topics in math and physics that you will use to create designs. You will learn to use computer programming to materialize these abstract concepts into powerful visuals. We will start our algorithmic art journey by discussing basics of coding, coordinate geometry, matrix algebra, and using each of these concepts to create something beautiful. Then we will move on to more advanced topics like cluster finding algorithm, differential equations and random walks, and use these sophisticated tools to make art.
This interdisciplinary, interactive course will encourage creativity and teach you many transferrable skills like coding, collaboration, deconstruction of a complex problem into simple parts, communication of ideas by visual means, and teamwork, all of which are useful skills for various types of projects. Towards the end of the semester, you will hear talks from professional artists about their approach to art. As students exploring visual art within the field of science, these talks will enrich our own understanding of beauty and aesthetics and teach you new concepts to apply in your own unique way in the creation of original science-inspired art.
I was a QBReC (Quantitative Biology Research Community) mentor during Spring 2022 and Spring 2023. During this time I mentored seven undergraduate students on research projects. I was responsible for designing the projects, drawing up a weekly plan, instructing students in small groups, and helping them prepare their final presentation.
I mentored parts of the senior thesis of two undergraduate students in my Chakraborty group, Rafi Rubenstein (Graduate of 2023) and Albert Countryman (graduate of 2024). Both of them helped me with parts of my research and later were co-authors on my papers.
PHYS 11A: Introductory Physics I (Fall 2020)
PHYS11B: Introductory Physics II (Spring 2021)