Back in June, Art Quarterly‘s editor got in touch to ask if I’d be interested in writing an opinion piece for the Autumn 2025 edition of the membership magazine for Art Fund, the charity behind the National Art Pass (which allows free or reduced access to museums, galleries and historic houses and associated exhibitions across the UK, and, incidentally, has a genuinely fantastic reduced price for teachers).
Maths? In a cultural-sector publication? How could I say no!
Art Quarterly is a membership benefit so I can’t share the article here, but you could always sneak a look over my shoulder, or sign up for a National Art Pass (it’s not for me to say whether my article on its own is good enough to warrant signing up, but there are plenty of other benefits). It also seems to be available here if you have an institutional login with the right access.
The brief asked me to write 650 words on the subject of how the objects and artworks held by museums and galleries relate to our understanding of maths. That’s right up my street! The article draws from my own personal experience but also the writing of others who recognise mathematics as an intensely creative discipline that is nevertheless routinely shunned by arts and heritage organisations, and provides some examples of where mathematics and specific museum collections have enormous potential to support each other if only they’d stop being so shy and take one another’s hand.
I also took the opportunity to flip the brief on its head: yes, there’s tremendous opportunity for museums and galleries to contribute to adjusting social narratives around mathematics; but it’s also true that mathematics tells us more about museums and galleries, entwined as it is with their histories, not to mention the roles it plays behind the scenes in terms of analysing, understanding and caring for historically important objects and buildings, and extracting the stories that we tell with and within them.
Would you like me to write something about where mathematics and culture collide for your publication? Get in touch.