What’s 6,000 mathematicians, divided by 2,500 talks and multiplied by four days?


The annual Joint Mathematics Meetings, which meets in Baltimore this week.

The convention, which organizers say is the world’s largest gathering of mathematicians, meets at the Baltimore Convention Center through Saturday. It is organized by the country’s two major professional groups for mathematicians and includes smaller meetings of other mathematical societies.

Mathematicians, some bearded and bespectacled, others young and flaunting tattoos of equations, will be filling the Inner Harbor with chatter about irreducible polynomials, combinatorics, differential equations and other topics that bring back bad memories from high school for many of us.

"It’s over everybody’s head," said Christie Burris, a 19-year-old sophomore math major at Colorado State University who was presenting a poster with some classmates. "There are so many specialized fields."

Burris, who has the number pi tattooed behind her ear, and her classmates presented an algorithim to win a video game; they attended a session on the mathematics of knitting and browsed sculptures inspired by geometry and string theory.

Math "is a lot different than people think," said Burris, standing near a swirl-shaped red sculpture. "I haven’t thought about calculus for years."

Nearby, Reza Sarhangi, a mathematics professor at Towson University, was guiding fellow mathematicians through the exhibit. He said math has more in common with art than most people think.

"People confuse mathematics with numbers," he said. "People think if you’re a mathematician, you should be able to calculate the restaurant bill really fast. But many mathematicians are bad at that."

Rather, he said, mathematicians are fascinated by patterns, much as artists and musicians are.

Sarhangi founded an internation conference on the intersection of math and art and organized the math-inspired art exhibit at this week’s convention.

The art works include a gleaming wooden sphere known by the tongue-tripping name, rhombicosidodecahedron. It’s formed by 12 pentagons, 20 triangles and 30 squares, cut with minute precision and carefully pieced together, said the sculpture’s creator, Hamp Stevens.

Stevens, a retired commodities trader from St. Steven’s Island, Ga., said he is not a mathematician, but became fascinated by the shape after seeing it in a book. He has sculpted the shape from strips of metal, fastened together at precise angles, as well as from polished wood.

Other art works include a sculptures made from the book pages folded according to calculus equations, a mathematical contemplation on cornrow braids and a "wormhole" twisted from two pieces of string.

The wormhole’s creator, Shanti Chandrasekar of Potomac, Md., said she has been fascinated by aymptotes, curves that infinitely approach a line without ever touching it, since girlhood.

"How close to zero could it go?" she said. "I used to dream about it in class until I missed the whole class."

Her sculpture resembles two elongated cones that merge at their narrowest points, creating a tiny opening through which viewers can peer.

On the other side of the exhibition space, workers were putting the final touches on a massive polyhedron — or multi-sided three-dimensional shape — designed by James Sawyer of Buffalo, N.Y.

Sawyer says the shape could be used to construct houses that could withstand strong winds and rains.

The many surfaces make the building "much stronger than your typical housing structure," he said.