Miri Golan
Israeli Origami Center and Origametria-Math Ltd
Israel
Born in Jerusalem, Miri Golan founded the Israeli Origami Center in 1993. Interested to use origami in education, she initially taught origami as a learning tool, supervising the training of specialist teachers to teach in up to 75 schools a year.
In 2000, Golan married the British origami artist Paul Jackson (also a Plenary Speaker at Bridges 2022) and the teaching emphasis changed to using origami as a tool to teach geometry. In 2018, the programme – Origametria – was accepted into the Israeli Ministry of Education curriculum for Mathematics, a world first for origami. At the time of writing, e-Learning Origametria reaches 30,000+ children each week, for Grades 1-6. Independent research has shown that children who learn geometry through the Origametria method score significantly higher in assessments than children who learn by traditional methods. The programme is seeking international partners.
The Israeli Origami Center organises international bi-annual conventions, also festivals and exhibitions, it creates publications ..and more.
Additionally, Golan is the founder of the Folding Together project, which uses origami to bring Jewish and Palestinian children together through origami. She is also an origami artist, who has exhibited frequently at home and abroad. Her large foldings comment on how Holy texts are misused to support factional interests, leading to the perpetuation of mistrust and conflict in her region and further afield.
Paul Jackson
Origami Artist
Israel
Born near Leeds, England and Fine Art educated (MA, Univ Coll London), Paul Jackson has been a professional paper artist, paper engineer, writer and teacher since 1983, specializing in origami and the folded arts. He was one of the first origami professionals in the West.
He has written more than 40 books, the first of which were origami books for adults and children. His more recent books have been about the application of folding techniques into design, a subject he has taught in more than 80 Universities and Colleges in 13 countries, to Design Students of many disciplines, including Fashion, Architecture, Ceramics, Jewellery, Product Design and Textiles.
He was one of the pioneers of folding/origami as Fine Art and has exhibited his folded artworks in many galleries and museums. He has also curated several ground-breaking exhibitions of origami, undertaken many commercial commissions for print, screen-based media, festivals and more, and has been a consultant for companies such as Siemens, Nike, Tetra-Pak and Tata.
In 2000, he married the Israeli origami artist and educator Miri Golan (also a Plenary Speaker at Bridges 2022), founder of the Israeli Origami Center (1993) and moved to Israel. In 2017, he was awarded the Sydney French Medal at the 50th Anniversary Convention of the British Origami Society, ‘in recognition of his outstanding contributions to origami’.
Matt Parker
Standup Mathematician
United Kingdom
Matt Parker is a stand-up comedian, #1-best-selling maths author and person who makes videos for the internet. Originally a maths teacher from Australia, Matt now lives in the UK but travels more than he probably should.
Matt is currently touring the UK with a stand-up show based on his book Humble Pi.
Rudy Rucker
Professor Emeritus, San Jose State University. Author.
Los Gatos, California
Rudy Rucker has published about forty books, both popular science and SF novels in the cyberpunk style, which he helped originate. Many of his SF novels are transreal as well, that is, they incorporate elements of real life. His nonfiction includes The Fourth Dimension, and Infinity and the Mind. He received Philip K. Dick awards for his Software and Wetware. He earned a Ph.D. in higher mathematics. He worked for twenty years as a professor of computer science in Silicon Valley, and for a time he was a software engineer at Autodesk. He paints works relating to his tales. His latest novel Juicy Ghosts is about telepathy, immortality, and an evil, insane US President. His short stories can be read for free on his Complete Stories webpage. Rudy has done research and software design in the fields of mathematical logic, chaos theory and cellular automata—and he’s thought deeply about how these notions apply to the process of creative writing. Rudy blogs at www.rudyrucker.com/blog.
Samuli Siltanen
University of Helsinki
Helsinki, Finland
Samuli Siltanen is a professor of Industrial Mathematics at the University of Helsinki. His research concerns applied inverse problems mostly arising from medical imaging and digital photography. He is the author (together with Jennifer Mueller) of “Linear and nonlinear inverse problems with practical applications” (SIAM 2012). Siltanen publishes popular science videos at the award-winning YouTube channel “Samun tiedekanava”. He is also a photographer whose work can be seen for example at the Instagram account @samuntiede.
Daina Taimina
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York, USA
Daina Taimina was born in Riga, Latvia and received all her formal education there. For 20 years Daina was on mathematics faculty in the University of Latvia. Since 1996 her professional career has been in Cornell University (USA), she retired from teaching there in 2015. Daina Taimina crocheted first hyperbolic plane for using it in geometry class in 1997. Since then she has crocheted many more turning original geometric model into an art piece.
Daina is an author of several books in mathematics (in Latvian, Russian, and English). Her book Crocheting Adventures with the Hyperbolic Planes (2009) in 2012 received Euler Book Prize for “the best book about mathematics for general audience” and in 2018 had its second edition. She has just completed new edition of Experiencing Geometry, which she was co-author with her husband David Henderson on its 3rd edition (2005) and his untimely death interrupted their work on 4th edition.
Daina has given many public lectures and invited talks, participated in art shows in USA, Belgium, Latvia, Italy, Germany, UK, Finland. She was one of the invited artists at the Riga International Contemporary Art Biennale 2 in 2020.
Andrew Witt
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Andrew Witt is trained as both an architect and mathematician, and works at the intersection of architecture and digital media. He is an Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard University, teaching and researching in the relationship of geometry and machines to perception, design, and culture.
He is also co-founder, with Tobias Nolte, of Certain Measures, a Boston/Berlin-based design studio that applies imagination and evidence to spatial problems. Their clients include Audi, BMW, SBB (Swiss Federal Railways), Futurium (the German federal museum of the future) and the Dubai Futures Foundation. Their work is in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou, and has been exhibited at the Pompidou, the Barbican Centre, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and Groninger Forum, among others.
Witt is a fellow of the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the Macdowell Colony, and a Graham Foundation grantee. He is the author of “Light Harmonies,” the first book devoted to the Rhythmograms of German proto-computational photographic hacker Heinrich Heidersberger. His forthcoming book “Formulations: Encodings of Architecture, Mathematics, and Culture” considers the history of mathematics in modern architecture. He previously solved complex geometric challenges for major building projects such as the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Louvre Abu Dhabi, and Qatar National Museum. He has an Erdős number of 3.
Jessica Wynne
Fashion Institute of Technology
New York, New York, USA
Jessica Wynne is a fine art photographer. She received her MFA from Yale University in 1999 and her BFA from SF Art Institute in 1994. Her exhibitions include: The Whitney Museum, Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Carriage Trade Gallery, The Museum at FIT, Arts and Leisure Gallery, Nars Art Foundation, and Thread Waxing Space. Publications include: Do Not Erase, Princeton Press (2020), Turn Shake Flip: Celebrate Contemporary Art, Eye Storm Books and 25 and Under: Photographers, W.W. Norton. Her work is in collections at The Morgan Library and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Wynne currently lives and works in New York City. She is a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology and is represented by Edwynn Houk Gallery.