April 22, 2010
He’s a mathematican, she’s an artist. Just don’t call them opposites
Just don’t say “opposites attract.” That is, if you happen to meet Timea Tihanyi, UW lecturer in fine arts, and Sándor Kovács, professor in the Department of Mathematics. The couple of almost two decades have heard that punch line too many times. They have come to feel that the reverse is true — that contemporary art and mathematics actually have a lot in common.
“It’s something we’ve been discussing ever since we known each other,” Tihanyi said. “People think that one is left brain and one is right brain, one is logical and the other is illogical. The more we discuss, we find there are a lot of similarities between the two disciplines.”
Although the two have never formally collaborated, their academic careers are closely intertwined. Tihanyi has incorporated ideas of string theory in her sculptures, which are as likely to be made from rubber or felt as from ceramics. She has borrowed ideas from the mathematical field of topology and explored how they related to the human body.
Kovács, for his part, finds that being married to an artist helps inspire the creative thinking that is essential for his work.
“Maybe art can’t help math directly, but it can help mathematicians, because I think it is useful to get out of one’s world and experience others,” Kovács said. “I really appreciate being married to an artist.”
After many years of trading ideas informally, the two will speak to UW donors next week for an Arts & Sciences Dean’s Club event. As of last weekend they had started compiling their thoughts, and had gathered a quantity of material more appropriate for a course, Kovács said, than for a single lecture.
“We are always being sidetracked and getting into conversations that will not directly translate into things that we could use in the talk,” Tihanyi said with a laugh.
No doubt their conversations overlap with some of the UW art courses she teaches, such as the first-year “Issues and influences,” or the upper-level courses “Why is that art?” and “Interdisciplinary concepts of time and space in contemporary art.”
Topics that intrigue them include how truth and beauty are defined in each of their fields, and ways in which math and art are similar or different.
“Something we’ve discussed recently is that both art and math can be viewed as a language to describe the world,” Kovács said. “Art is a subjective way, and math is an objective way, but you can describe both as a medium of expression to deliver ideas to other people.”
They also believe that both mathematics and contemporary art are widely misunderstood.
“For him, math is not about numbers,” Tihanyi said. “For me, art is not about pretty pictures.”
The couple met in the 1990s while they were both university students in Hungary. Tihanyi earned her degree in medicine. When she moved to the United States she serendipitously took up sculpture, and in 2003 earned her Master’s of Fine Arts degree in ceramics at the UW.
Perhaps because of her medical training, the human body is an important theme in Tihanyi’s work, which has been exhibited at places including the Seattle Art Museum Gallery, Chicago’s International Museum of Surgical Science, and Harborview Medical Center.
“I never really believed that there was a big difference between art and science,” Tihanyi said.
Kovács also has participated in interdisciplinary collaborations. A few years ago he worked with artist Lun-Yi Tsai to create a representation of his research in higher-dimensional geometry. One of Kovács’ former graduate students, Zack Treisman, built a giant model of his doctoral thesis in the Nevada desert while attending Burning Man.
Neither Tihanyi nor Kovács wants to jump the fence into each other’s discipline. Kovács says he would like to pursue art, but has no talent for it. And Tihanyi says she does not understand string theory, and does not want to create art that simply illustrates a scientific concept.
But they find common ground in the creative process.
“In talking about our work, we discovered that the way we solve problems is very similar,” Kovács said.
The first challenge is they often don’t exactly know what problem they are trying to solve, or whether an answer exists.
“She has some vague idea about the piece she wants to do, and there’s some particular thing about that piece, but she doesn’t yet know how to do it,” Kovács said.
And as Tihanyi describes her husband’s work in higher-dimensional geometry, “He’s sort of thinking about space, but he’s thinking about spaces and objects in higher dimensions.”
So when confronting a problem they must hope for inspiration, while at the same time doggedly trying different approaches.
Kovács describes solving a mathematics problem as like exploring a room in the darkness.
“You kind of move around the room and you bump into furniture, then you try another way, and little by little you map out the room and figure out where the furniture is, maybe you find a wall and move around the wall,” Kovács said. “At one point you find the light switch and turn it on, and everything is clear.”
“Once you actually figure it out, you wonder why you didn’t think of that as first, because it’s so obvious that it’s the right solution. But you kind of have to go bumping around into furniture first.”
Tihanyi is more likely to be literally bumping things, or breaking them, as she describes in her blog. For example, building an umbrella-shaped mold for a bone china sculpture turned out to be a major technical challenge.
“I’m more of an empirical person, it’s coming from handling materials and seeing the results and making accidents along the way. And Sandor is more of a theoretical person, of thinking things through and hoping that the reality will prove it,” Tihanyi said.
Ironically, Kovács works in an area that is impossible to represent visually. Higher-dimensional geometry is related to string theory and used every day to route cell phone calls, but it is outside the realm of human experience.
“What I usually tell my students is the first step to understanding higher dimensions is stop trying to imagine them,” Kovács said, “because your mind is three-dimensional, and anything you try to imagine is very misleading.”
“But at the same time,” he conceded, “trying to figure out what happens in higher dimensions, sometimes an image can help.”
Just as their private conversations have sparked ideas, they hope that the public presentation will generate more discussion and questions about what it means to pursue math or art.
“Each of these disciplines is ignored or misunderstood for its own reasons,” Tihanyi said. “So we’re trying to make it fun, and show that there are things that seem like opposites but they really have similarities, or they need each other.”
