Most of us are aware that there TUL has an academic orchestra and a choir, both of which grace important events and fill scientific brains and souls with the sound of beautiful music during their concerts. It is also worth mentioning the TMiIT Faculty, where students get to design (and it is not only clothing), the Photography Club that holds exhibitions, and the SuPŁy band that performs sea shanties. There are many others, which, unfortunately, I cannot include here.
However, apart from these formalized structures for sharing artistic pursuits, our university also boasts artistic individuals: students who are art literate, who do art and even set artistic trends. How do you find out about them, though?
Well, there is the regular student Conference of Applications of Mathematics (!) MathUp, which is a fantastic enterprise that brings together young people who are fascinated by the queen of sciences and those who perceive the beauty of the world through the queen's eyes.
To give you a better idea of how mathematics can be successfully applied let me tell you about a paper by Anna Walczak titled Design Counts, or Mathematics in Interactive Jewelry Design, presented in this year's edition. All participants had the opportunity to follow the process of the design of such adornments, and, behind the scenes, to touch the first models, printed on a 3D printer, and even to try them on.
You could also listen to Agata Kmiecik and Maria Kaniewska talking about 'Geometry in web design' and explaining that the golden ratio is used by artists and amateurs alike when they want to share their graphic designs with the world, create logos, posters or take beautiful photographs. In the meantime, members of the TUL Photography Club along with other skilled students took truly artistic photos of the speakers and attendees. Just see for yourself how much talent they showed:
But the most spectacular was this year's presentation by Anna Magnuszewska, who not only is fascinated by the arts (including painting and music) and is herself an expert performer (she records solo instrumental performances), but is also an avid storyteller. This time she was the one who with her story about mathematics hidden in music, Music through the eyes of a mathematician, both this rudeimentary kind of maths you learn in the early stages of your school education, and advanced math that you only get to study within the confines of the university, grabbed the hearts not only of many of the conference attendees, but also of the Dean of Faculty of Electrical, Electronic, Computer and Control Engineering himself, Professor Jacek Kucharski, who awarded her the main MathUp award, the Dean's Cup, for her presentation.
The Dean said, 'Listening to the presentations is a feast...There was much to delight in...I was moved to realize that if numbers rule beauty, they also rule beauty in music.
When mentioning the presentations on the arts, one cannot help but think back to presentations from the previous editions of the conference:
- about Krzysztof Adamkiewicz's project of creating 'computer' art generated by words, Creating art with text guided image synthesis with CLIP and VQGAN
- about fashion design by Kinga Wozniak, 'Mathematics of women's fashion'
- about the beauty around us by Szymon Nadgłowski, 'The Mysterious Fibonacci Sequence'
- about the visualization of sound by Martyna Pędzik and Łukasz Matusiak, 'I can see that sound. I can hear that image.'
On top of that, the MathUp initiative has also received support from 'real' artists, including Robert Z., who designed banners, invitations, and many other visuals in preparation for the next editions.
So, dear reader, do not be surprised when passing through the university buildings you will see people consumed by science, but with the souls of artists - receptive of beauty and capable of sharing this sentiment with others. I wish you may experience this kind of exhiliaration and wonder every day (in between one integral and another 😉).