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It was 1990 and I was just a student in the second year of the college. In his lecture of the Analysis Course, Prof. Koçak has addressed a question to the class: “Look at the drawing of “y = - x2 parabola” on the blackboard. What would the surface look like, when you turn the parabola 360° around the y-axis?” There were almost forty people in the class but only one of them could perceive it similar to a “bullet”. What is interesting in this matter is not the fact that only one student could answer the question, but only that student could identify a 3-D form out of 2-D drawing. Throughout the mathematics education, we have tried to understand many theories about surfaces or spaces, which were totally beyond our imagination. Upon this little anecdote, I asked myself, “How come we could imagine these unidentified forms in our minds?” Did we register this as a sentence out of some symbols gathered on a piece of paper? If so, the essential questions are:
I lectured as a mathematician in many seminars at the Hacettepe University’s Fine Art Faculty. I usually prefer to describe the matter by simple examples: “Lets say you are asked to form a cup out of anything you like? Most people would pick up a prism shaped material to start off. However, I would choose “a circle and two line families” or “two conics” to form the same cup. The students attending to the seminars, usually, give the same response; they say “we are using mathematics to create sculptures, however in the form of “vector mathematics”. This argument is acceptable but the richness of mind in theories is not limited to this information.
Some people may have trouble to perceive an object in 3-D, whereas others may perceive 3-D objects easily but have trouble with different variables and dimensions. While we are searching for an answer to a question in science or art, we are specializing ourselves in one field and neglect the rest. I strongly believe this is a wrong approach. |
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