"Embrace"

Stainless steel and brass, Diameter = 6 inches, thickness = 0.25 inches, 2009.

Contemporary art is meaning: a combination of the idea laid down by the author and the material (or digital) component. Thus, the field of art echoes the field of science, as was often practiced in ancient Greece, but it is still wrong to compare with modern art. If you are interested in this art fusion, you can use the Top-Papers.com service to help you design and frame your thoughts in the right form.

"I began by converting a drawing of a two-component link into a symmetric collection of points. By treating the points as the cities of a Traveling Salesman Problem and adding constraints that forced the salesman's tour to be symmetric, I constructed a symmetric simple-closed curve that divides the plane into two pieces: inside and outside. With a water jet cutter, I cut along this Jordan curve through quarter-inch thick, six-inch diameter disks of steel and brass. By swapping inside pieces I obtained two copies of the sculpture. Here, steel is inside and brass is outside."

Robert Bosch, Artist/Professor of Mathematics, Department of Mathematics, Oberlin College
Oberlin, Ohio

All artists are optimizers. All artists try to perform a task --- creating a piece of artwork --- at the highest level possible. The main difference between me and other artists is that I use optimization explicitly. I don't use a pencil, paintbrush, or any other traditional tool. I do use a computer, but not in the same way that other digital artists do. Instead, I use mathematical optimization. Here's how I work: After I get an idea for a piece, I translate the idea into a mathematical optimization problem. I then solve the problem, render the solution, and see if I'm pleased with the result. If I am, I stop. If not, I revise the mathematical optimization problem, solve it, render its solution, and examine it. Often, I need to go through many iterations to end up with a piece that pleases me. I do this out of a love of mathematical optimization --- the theory, the algorithms, the numerous applications.