Perhaps it was inevitable that Davide Cervone would become a mathematician working at the intersection of math and art.
As a young boy, he idolized Leonardo da Vinci. And just like the artist-engineer of the Renaissance, Cervone carefully recorded his observations in a series of notebooks. As a teenager, he was captivated by Star Wars. But while most of his contemporaries gazed in awe as X-wing fighters zoomed around the Death Star, Cervone was wondering about the mathematics that made those scenes possible. The movie inspired him to work out a method of drawing 3D pictures, which he used to graph a 3D picture of his family's living room.
Years later at Brown University, Cervone's mentor and Ph.D. advisor, Tom Banchoff, asked him to write a polyhedral modeling program. Cervone used the ideas he developed in high school to write the program in graduate school.
Cervone, assistant professor of mathematics, is the artist-mathematician behind a number of colorful pieces in an exhibit titled “Intricate Perceptions,” a collaborative show in the second-floor lounge of the Social Sciences Building. The exhibit also features up-close photography by Patrick O'Rourke, formerly of Mandeville Gallery, and prints of fractal geometry by artist Jonathan Leavitt. The opening reception is Tuesday, Jan. 22, at 3:45 p.m., during which Cervone will discuss his work.
Intriguing and colorful, Cervone's images have appeared as cover art on a number of mathematical journals and books. All based on mathematical equations, the images depict four- dimensional objects in various ways. In one, a swirl of vibrant colors rotate around a point. In another piece, a sphere is turned inside-out, intersecting with itself.
Other of Cervone's work, in collaboration with Banchoff, can be seen in a “virtual gallery” on his Web site. The viewer can click on the “walls” to see the works, the artist's comments and movies of the images as they rotate. The URL is: http://www.math.brown.edu/~banchoff/art/PAC-9603/. Cervone developed the software for generating the images.
Cervone, on the faculty at Union since 1996, earned a bachelor's degree from Williams College, and a Ph.D. from Brown University.