John Sullivan
"Minimal Flower 3"
Computer-printed sculpture. Size: 9" x 9" x 7". 2001.
John M. Sullivan was born in 1963 in Princeton, NJ, USA.
After earlier degrees from Harvard and Cambridge Universities,
he received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton in 1990.
He was then a postdoctoral fellow at the Geometry Center,
and taught at the University of Minnesota. In 1997 Sullivan
took a new faculty position at the University of Illinois, Urbana.
In 2003, he moved to Berlin, where he is Professor of Mathematical
Visualization at TU Berlin. Sullivan's mathematical art -- prints
and sculptures generated by computer -- has been exhibited in Manhattan,
Bologna, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Paris.
"My art is an outgrowth of my work as a mathematician. My research studies
curves and surfaces whose shape is determined by optimization principles
or minimization of energy. A classical example is a soap bubble which
is round because it minimizes its area while enclosing a fixed volume.
Like most research mathematicians, I find beauty in the elegant structure
of mathematical proofs, and I feel that this elegance is discovered,
not invented, by humans. I am fortunate that my own work also leads
to visually appealing shapes, which can present a kind of beauty more
accessible to the public.
"Minimal Flower 3" is an homage to Brent Collins, whose sculptures
have been very inspirational to me. For this sculpture, I designed the
boundary curve and an initial surface by hand, and then used software
to model a minimal surface. This, mathematically, is the optimal shape
a soap-film spanning across the boundary would achieve. The geometric
equilibrium of a minimal surface, where the curvatures of the surface
always balance in a saddle configuration, adds to its beauty."
John's website and e-mail address are:
http://torus.math.uiuc.edu/jms/
jms@isama.org