Speaker: Raúl Ibáñez Torres (UPV/EHU)
Date and time: 7 March 2024, 19:00
Venue: Residencia de Estudiantes (Calle de Pinar, 21-23. 28006 Madrid)
Abstract: In the early 20th century, the Russian painter Vasily Kandinsky, seeking a degree of objectivity in the creative process, 
proposed “the premises of an art in which the artist’s imagination would be replaced by mathematical conception.” This revolutionary idea was taken up by certain abstract art movements, such as concrete art, British constructivism, minimalism and conceptual art, which used mathematics as a tool in artistic creation.
Through some specific examples, this talk will show how the Pythagorean theorem, the Möbius strip, multiplication, Latin squares, permutations, the Truchet tile, the number Pi or the Fibonacci sequence can be used as tools for creating works of art.
In addition, it will analyse works, among others, by the concrete artists Max Bill and Richard P. Lohse; the neo-concrete Lygia Clark; the conceptual artists Mel Bochner and Sol Lewitt; the minimalists Carl André, Cruz Novillo and the composer Tom Johnson; the British constructivists Peter Lowe and Mary Marti; the geometric abstractionist Anni Albers; and the arte povera artist Mario Merz.
Raúl Ibáñez Torres is a mathematician, Professor of Geometry at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and a science communicator. He is part of the UPV/EHU Chair of Scientific Culture and contributes to its blog Cuaderno de Cultura Científica. He has been scriptwriter and presenter of the segment “Una de Mates” on the television programme Órbita Laika (La 2, TVE). Since 2005, he has collaborated on the programmes Graffiti and La mecánica del caracol on Radio Euskadi. He was also a contributor and co-writer of the documentary Hilos de tiempo (2020) on the artist Esther Ferrer (winner of the Best National Documentary Award at the DART Festival, 2021). For 20 years, he directed the DivulgaMAT portal, the Virtual Centre for the Dissemination of Mathematics, and was a member of the outreach committee of the Spanish Royal Mathematical Society (RSME). He is the author of several popular science books, including Los secretos de la multiplicación (2019), La gran familia de los números (2021) and Las matemáticas como herramienta de creación artística (2023), in the Miradas Matemáticas collection (Catarata). He has received the 5th José María Savirón Prize for Scientific Dissemination (national category, 2010) and the COSCE Award for the Dissemination of Science (2011).