The Mathematics of Wirebending - Vernelle Noel
Channel: IAS | Park City Mathematics Institute | PCMI
Date: 20/07/2021

The Illustrating Math program at PCMI Plenary Address

Topic: The Mathematics of Wirebending
Speaker: Vernelle Noel 
Affiliation: University of Florida
Date: July 20, 2021



Craft practices, knowledges, and communities are disappearing. These practices carry with them histories and cultures of people, knowledges, and social ties to communities. One of these practices is wire-bending in the Trinidad Carnival, which began in the 1930s. Some reasons for its disappearance include dying practitioners, lacking pedagogy, changing practices, and technocentric developments. How might we employ mathematics in the restoration, remediation, and reconfiguration of this practice, knowledge, and community? In this talk, I share: (1) The Bailey-Derek Grammar, a mathematical description of this dying craft which has aided in documentation and transmission of this knowledge, (2) new tectonics for construction based on shape calculations and transformations, and (3) new artistic expressions and play resulting from the creation of experimental CAD software based on the culture of Carnival and wire-bending.
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