Students in Randolph-Macon College Professor Eve Torrence’s honors course, Making Mathematics, are spending the semester exploring the intersection of mathematics and art.

Torrence’s students are using bead crochet to explore mathematical concepts. In a recent assignment, students created bracelets and pendants that model torus knots. Torus knots are closed loops that lie on a torus (or doughnut shape) without crossing themselves. They are part of an area of mathematics called Knot Theory that is often not studied until graduate school.

“The course explores graph theory, knot theory, topology, group theory and geometry, and uses art to help students understand the mathematics,” says Torrence. “Students have the unique opportunity to make tangible models of the mathematics topics that we’re studying, many of which are quite complex.”

Making the Magic
Ali Fay ’19, a Spanish and international studies major, has enjoyed discovering the beauty of mathematics.

“It’s a very satisfying feeling when a bracelet starts to look like the pattern you are using,” says Fay. “This class has made me think more about the underlying math in different designs. Every day I find myself thinking about the math behind patterns I see all around me.”

Fay’s classmate, Emily Amelung ’22, finds the link between mathematics and art astonishing.

“I never expected to see a side of math like this,” says Amelung, a biology major and Spanish minor. “We are taking something simple like a graph and finding ways it connects into making beautiful bracelets. It is such an interesting process, to slowly watch yourself take some beads and transform them into a bracelet. At first it was a little difficult to wrap our minds around how crocheting and math could ever connect—but once the connection was made we started to make the magic.”

Eve Torrence
Torrence, who earned her B.A. from Tufts University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, joined the RMC faculty in 1994.

She served as president of Pi Mu Epsilon (PME), the National Mathematics Honor Society, from 2011-2014 and served on the national council of PME from 2002-2017. She also served as chair of the Maryland/District of Columbia/Virginia section of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) and as chair of R-MC’s Committee on the Faculty. She is currently a member of the board of the Bridges Organization, which organizes the world’s largest interdisciplinary conference on the connections between mathematics and the arts.

Torrence is the author of Cut and Assemble Icosahedra: Twelve Models in White and Color, and, with Mathematics Professor Bruce Torrence, The Student’s Introduction to Mathematica and the Wolfram Language. She is also a co-recipient, with RMC Mathematics Professor Adrian Rice, of the 2007 Trevor Evans Award for exceptional writing published in the journal Math Horizons.

Torrence’s artwork has been displayed in the college’s McGraw-Page Library as well as at international juried shows of mathematical art; and her aluminum origami sculpture, “Sunrise,” is displayed in the lobby of RMC’s Copley Science Center.

In 2013, Torrence was one of 12 recipients of the 2013 SCHEV/Dominion Resources Outstanding Faculty Award. In 2015 she won the top award in the International Juried Mathematical Art Show at the Bridges Math and Art conference.