Map Coloring Jewelry Set
Glass beads, gold-filled beads, thread, ear wires
2014
Bridges Art Exhibition, Baltimore, July–August 2015
Bridges 2015 Connections Between Mathematics and Art–Townson University Center for the Arts Gallery, Towson, MD, June–July 2015
Best Textile, Sculpture, or Other Medium at the Joint Mathematics Meetings Exhibition of Mathematical Art, San Antonio, 2015
While every map on a plane can be colored with four colors so that no two adjacent countries are the same color, maps on other surfaces may require more colors. This jewelry set displays maps requiring the maximum number of colors for three surfaces.
The bracelet, bead crochet with a bead-woven closure, is a double torus in eight colors, each of which touches all the others. The gold bead in the center of the pink and blue spiral is strictly ornamental. The pendant is a bead-crochet torus with seven colors, and all of the color contacts are visible from the front side. The bead-woven earrings are each four-color maps in the plane. With over 5300 beads in total, the entire set is wearable topology at its finest.
The underlying mathematics and the design process are addressed in Chapter 2 of my book with Ellie Baker, Crafting Conundrums: Puzzles and Patterns for the Bead Crochet Artist, and in my 2014 Bridges paper, Capturing Eight-Color Double-Torus Maps.