"Island I"

Digital print on canvas, 17" by 17", 2009.

A simple closed curve (white/sand) divides a disk into two regions: inside (green/land) and outside (blue/water).

"Island II"

Digital print on canvas, 17" by 17", 2008.




A simple closed curve (white/sand) divides a disk into two regions: inside (green/land) and outside (blue/water).

"Island III

Digital print on canvas, 17" by 17", 2008.

A simple closed curve (white/sand) divides a disk into two regions: inside (green/land) and outside (blue/water).

"Island IV"

Digital print on canvas, 17" by 17", 2008.




A simple closed curve (white/sand) divides a disk into two regions: inside (green/land) and outside (blue/water).

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

"I like to work with self-imposed constraints. For this series, I challenged myself to use simple closed curves to make "portraits" of symmetric two-component links. My method entailed converting a computer-generated drawing of the link into a symmetric collection of points, viewing the points as the cities of an instance of the traveling salesman problem (TSP), and then solving the TSP. When solving the TSP, I made sure that the salesman's tour was symmetric, and I forced it to wind its way through the cities in such a way that when I colored the inside and outside of the tour, the resulting portrait of the link would do it justice."