Making math inspire

Vi Hart,a recreational mathematician,has wowed the Web with her exuberant exploration of math as art.

Vi Harther given name is Victoria,but she has long since dropped the last six lettershas an audacious career ambition: She wants to make math cool. She calls herself a full-time recreational mathemusician,an off-the-beaten-path choice with limited prospects. And for most of the two years since she graduated from Stony Brook University,life as a recreational mathemusician has indeed been a meagre niche pursuit.

Then,in November,she posted on YouTube a video about doodling in math class,which married a distaste for the way math is taught in school with an exuberant exploration of math as art. The video never shows her face,just her hands doodling in a notebook. She talks about binary trees,she did another about doodling snakes (which segues into graph theory,a subject too interesting to be included in most grade-school curricula, she says).

The videos went viral,viewed more than a million times. At first glance,her fascination with mathematics might seem odd. She graduated with a degree in music,and never took a math course in college. At second glance,the intertwining of art and math seems to be the family business. Her father,George W. Hart,builds sculptures based on geometric forms. In college,she collaborated on a number of papers with Erik D. Demaine,an MIT professor best known for his origami creations. After finishing her music degreeas a senior,she composed and conducted a seven-part musical piece based on the seven Harry Potter booksI couldnt focus on one thing or ever see myself fitting into any slot where I would have some sort of normal job, Hart said. If I want to spend a week carving fruit up into polyhedra,I want to spend a week doing that and where am I going to get a job doing that? She did indeed spend a week carving fruit into polyhedrons,posting photographs and instructions on her website,vihart.com.

Last summer,she became enamoured of hyperbolic planes,mathematical surfaces that are represented as Pringles chips. Whereas others make bracelets or necklaces out of beads,she constructed hyperbolic planes and painted the images. Such mathematical musings drew modest amounts of interest. In the fall,she was looking over some of her doodles and thought of taking photographs of them and writing instructions for those,but decided to do something different. She made her first doodling video. The ensuing attention has come with job offers and an income. In one week in December,she earned $300 off the advertising revenue that YouTube shares with video creators. She is also happy that,unlike in her early efforts,which drew an audience typical of mathematics researcholder and male,mostlythe biggest demographic for her new videos,are teenage girls. I want to be the ambassador of mathematics, Hart said.

For the holidays,she took advantage of the musical side of her mathemusician identity,rewriting The 12 Days of Christmas. On the fourth day of Christmas,my true love gave to me: the smallest possible number of sides on a polyhedron,the number of points that define a plane,the divisor of even numbers and any other number to the power of zero. Mathematical translation: polyhedrons have a minimum of four sides,three points define a plane,two is a divisor of all even numbers,and any number raised to the power of zero is one.KENNETH CHANG