Continuing Collaboration: Erfle and Chakerian
After graduating from UC Davis, I went on to obtain a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard in 1983. I taught for six years as an assistant professor at UC Irvine before moving to Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, where I still teach. Being at a liberal arts college has allowed me to stretch beyond my formal area of expertise. I have done that extensively, working in areas as far-flung as sports psychology, political geography, communications theory, public health, economics pedagogy, as well as a bit of economics.
But the project I am most excited by is the work I am now doing at the edge of art and mathematics. I was introduced to string art by my high school math teacher, and I spent a lot of time creating images during my high school and college years. I went on to other things, until 30 years later I was asked to show my son’s 5th grade class some cool things you could do with Excel spreadsheets. I wondered if I would be able to recreate string art in an electronic environment using Excel. The answer was yes! And I created a file that allowed students to create their own images by simply placing vertices in the (x, y) plane.
Another few years would pass before my eldest daughter decided to attend Dickinson as a math and computer science double major. We dusted off that file and published an article in Bridges in 2020. My younger daughter was interested in early elementary education, and I knew that her students would not yet have learned about coordinates. By restricting the discussion to regular polygons and stars, I was able to write a paper with her and several elementary education teacher coauthors in Spreadsheets in Education, 2021.
As I worked on this it became clear that this restriction had enormous benefits in terms of being able to reach young people. I started writing a blog called Playing with Polygons in early 2021. Some of the images that I was able to create with the Excel files were of sufficient interest that my mentor, UC Davis professor emeritus, Don Chakerian, suggested we might write a paper together using them as a backdrop. The resulting paper, “Up the Hill and Down Again,” was published in College Mathematics Journal in September 2023.
The string art chapter of Playing with Polygons became sufficiently enormous that I went to the editor of the AK Peters/CRC Recreational Mathematics Series to see if he thought I might have a book instead of a chapter in a book. He encouraged me to submit a proposal, and the resulting book, Electronic String Art: Rhythmic Mathematics, is slated for publication in January 2024. I continue to meet wonderful UCD graduates and I think we have a lot in common, despite what we studied when we were at Davis. I think that Davis is a very special place for nurturing young people, it certainly was for me.
Highlight on G. Don Chakerian
G. Don Chakerian joined the Department in 1963 after getting his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. He retired in 1994.
Learn more about Professor Emeritus Chakerian in an interview where he talks about mathematicians who shaped his career, how he came to Davis, and what influenced his interest in his research. The interview was conducted by fellow Math emeritus Sherman Stein in 2006 as part of a series and hosted on UCD’s Aggie Video.
Watch an interview with G. Don Chakerian
Read more on string art and K-12 education
Erfle’s blog is a wealth of polygonal information, with information for instructional use as well as explanations and videos.
Play with polygons on Erfle's website
In December 2024 Erfle will present “Machines Calculate, but Humans Evaluate” at the Generative Art Conference at UNESCO Regional Bureau for Science and Culture in Europe, in Venice, Italy. The title is taken from an email received from his mentor, Don Chakerian, when discussing humanistic elements of generative art.
Read about Erfle's generative art (PDF)