Concinnitas Portfolio

Summer 2016 – Summer 2018

Simon Donaldson, Ampère’s Law, from the Concinnitas Portfolio, 2014, aquatint, ed. 5/100, co-published by Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT and Parasol Press, Ltd., Portland, OR, Union College Permanent Collection, 2015.3.3 UCPC, courtesy of Parasol Press

Curated by Daniel Rockmore, Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Dartmouth College: “Concinnitas is a portfolio of ten fine art aquatint prints featuring equations, expressions, or formulas transcribed by ten notable mathematicians and physicists, in response to the prompt to record their ‘most beautiful mathematical expression.’

The portfolio draws its name from a word famously used by the Renaissance scholar, artist, architect, and philosopher Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) to connote the balance of number, outline, and position (in essence, number, geometry, and topology) that he believed characterize a beautiful work of art.”

This exhibition was organized and produced by the Mandeville Gallery. We hope that a second edition of the Concinnitas Portfolio will be created in the future, and will include women mathematicians and physicists, such as the first female Fields Medal winner, Maryam Mirzakhani, of Stanford University.

Each image was hand-drawn by each of the following participants: Sir Michael Atiyah, Enrico Bombieri, Simon K. Donaldson, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Karp, Peter Lax, David Mumford, Stephen Smale, and Steven Weinberg.