MARGARET AND CHRISTINE WERTHEIM
[THE INSTITUTE FOR FIGURING]

“IT REALLY DID SEEM LIKE A CRAZY CONSTRUCT.”
Helpful things to have in order to crochet a coral reef:
Knowledge of non-euclidean geometry
Interest in embodied forms of reasoning
A global sewing bee of serious science communication

The one came out of the sciences, the other out of the arts, although that’s probably the wrong way to put it, since they both came out of the same mother in the same place on the same day—identical twins, Australia in the late fifties: Margaret and Christine Wertheim—such that their subsequent divergence (physics and painting, respectively) may never have been as wide as it seemed, and their coming back together years later, in their adopted hometown of Los Angeles, to found the marvelously inspired Institute For Figuring (IFF), may never have been all that unlikely a prospect. The Institute, at any rate, is one of those heterodox polymath L.A. wonders—close sibling of the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the Center for Land Use Interpretation and Farmlab and Beyond Baroque—a center, in its instance, for the identification, elaboration, and celebration of all manner of delicious affinities between the sciences, mathematics, and the arts, disciplines that, to hear these twins tell it (in their vividly infectious and enthusiastic manner), may themselves also be well-nigh identical under the skin.

Read the entire interview here (subscription required): http://www.believermag.com/issues/201102/?read=interview_wertheim

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