Davide Cervone does art
for art's sake as well as to illustrate math.
“When I was a kid, I had to decide between math and art, and I decided I wasn't going to decide. Actually, I decided in favor of math, but I still got to do both.”
As a young boy, he idolized Leonardo da Vinci. And just like the Renaissance artist-engineer, Cervone carefully recorded his observations in a series of notebooks. As a teenager, he was captivated by Star Wars. But while his contemporaries gazed in awe as X-wing fighters zoomed around the Death Star, Cervone wondered about the math that made those scenes possible. The movie inspired him to work out a method of drawing that he used to graph a three-dimensional picture of his family's living room.
Years later at Brown University, Cervone's mentor and Ph.D. adviser, Tom Banchoff, asked him to write a polyhedral modeling program. Cervone was able to use the ideas he'd worked out in high school. He has since developed software that makes it possible for the user to create three-dimensional mathematical imagery fairly easily. In other words, the user doesn't have to program. His software is interactive, making it easy to rotate geometric objects and manipulate them in other ways. His own animations show phenomena such as the folding of a hypercube.