Math Art Project Reflection

Our group chose AnneMarie Torresen's "Prime-ary Colors" as our project. In her piece, AnneMarie assigned the colours red, green and blue to the prime numbers 2, 3 and 5 respectively. She also assigned some random shade of grey to all the other prime numbers for positive integers from 0 to 99. Using these assigned colours, she created a triangle (see beside) of 100 strips; each strip representing the numbers 0 to 99 and each colour of the strip being dictated by its prime factorization. For example, the number 10 breaks down into 2 times 5 so it would be a mixture of equal parts red and blue (so purple). The number 12 breaks down into 2 times 2 times 3 so it would be a mixture of two-thirds part red and one-third part green. We recreated AnneMarie's piece by following a similar structure however our shades of grey for the other prime numbers were not the same so it turned out a little different (see below). For our extension, we decided to create concentric circles following a similar theme but we wanted to highlight important aspects of the first few positive integers using prime signatures. We texturized perfect squares which have a prime signature of {2}. We also highlighted numbers with prime signatures {1,1} - so numbers that feel like primes but aren't. Our largest extension was to highlight numbers based on their Euler's totient and we did this as well through texturizing their respective concentric circles (see below). We wanted to visualize the distribution of these fascinating throughout the first 100 integers on the number line.   

At the absolute least, this project was extremely interesting to work on. I had never really thought of numbers and their prime factorizations before so it almost felt like I was learning something new. Our group collaborated well and it was a great experience to have a group where we not only welcomed each other's ideas, but built on them as well. I'm not tech savvy at all so recreating AnneMarie's art piece took me much longer than it should have. I was not aware of the RGB 255 colour breakdown of all colours so it was a learning experience for me to find all these mixtures and try to be consistent (although I made at least one mistake!).