Math-related doodles & minis from COMICS WORKSHOP:
More Recreational Math+COMICS+ART links >>

1 Monster Invites Another
How one monster grows into a quarter-thousand (& counting)…!

Escher’s “Approaches to Infinity”: There Must Be Stars
I take this passage in Escher’s essay to be particularly appropriate for comics creators:

Museum Courtyard: Above & Below
It looks like we’ve learned our lesson from the last time we played on a three-dimensional staircase …

Escher’s “Approaches to Infinity” Part 2: Music & Eternity
“to approach eternity by means of sounds”…?

Watch Your Step
Three-point perspective staircase distortion, drawn at Currier Art Museum …

Escher Exhibit
Journal comic inspired by a recent visit to the Currier Museum’s mind-bending exposition…

Staircase Encounter
(Drawn for “M.C. Escher: Reality and Illusion” at The Currier Museum.)

Hotel Infinity
“Up ahead in the distance, / I saw a shimmering light…”:

From One Math to Another
Gosh it’s nice to get home to NH.

Deferential Calculus
The most self-effacing of all maths.

Hotel Infinity: Quiet Hours
You don’t always want to encounter infinity in a strange hotel …

2×2=5 Talkin’ Blues Video
Finally, a video version of our earlier all-comics proof …

Pythagorean Maxims #16-30
More lifestyle advice from our brilliant & eccentric Ancient Greek mathematician …

Patterns of Ideas (Hardy)
Quoting G. H. Hardy’s 1940 essay, “A Mathematician’s Apology”…

Mathematics is an Art (Lockhart)
One reader’s notes to Paul Lockhart’s thought-provoking “A Mathematician’s Lament” …

Pythagorean Maxims #1-15
“Rules of the Good Life,” according to one of Ancient Greece’s most amazing mathematicians …

100 Pounds of Apples
Here’s a delicious puzzle with a counter-intuitive result, based on the “potato paradox”:

Alexander Horned Steer
The final image ever captured by our late Mythematical Beasts Dept. editor …

Escher’s “Approaches to Infinity” Part 1
The first of a finite series of comics adapting Escher’s 1971 essay…

Talkin’ 2×2=5 Blues
Are we allowed to do talkin’ blues algebra proofs? ~
If NOT, maybe this is why — here’s one inspired by Lewis Carroll. ~
Goes a little like this…

Math Flower
“When are we ever gonna see this in the REAL WORLD?”

Patchwork Cantor Angel
Here’s a close up of another such creature …

Cliche Conversion Charts
Bird(s) in bush as a function of bird(s) in hand, and other relationships …

Recursive Load
I’ve been thinking about recursion lately, which of course (if you think about it) usually means I’m thinking about thinking about recursion, which of course…

Pointy Things + Round Things
Circles and Triangles are in many ways about a far apart as shapes can get; and yet… and yet.

Archimedes’ Fatal Work Ethic
You have to respect a mathematician who’s so engrossed in his work that he doesn’t even notice the Romans invading his city…

Dinner-Party Puzzle Fail
Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) learns how NOT to perform post-prandial high-stakes testing…

Lewis Carroll’s River Crossing Puzzle
This logic puzzle was a favorite of math professor (and part-time wonderlander) Charles Dodgson …

Alexander Horned Sphere
Sometimes you have to draw such a thing before it jumps up and comes to life and runs away on you …

Decision Tree
Discrete Regretroactology is the study of finite sequences of decisions and their effects on the appearances of stick figures involved in them …

Pythagoras Tree
It takes some careful attention to grow a healthy specimen …

Cantor Angel
At first glance, your typical Cantor Set can appear rather stilted & stodgy… But what if there were a different way to envision this structure?

More Knots
I guess technically some of these are knots, and some are… well… not.

Un-possible Cubes
Hollow cubes, both possible and un-possible:

Prime Spirals
Just playing around a bit with the Ulam spiral… It makes me want to cover the walls with

Ama tu ritmo / Love Your Rhythm (Dario)
A passionate Dario poem with a mathematical pulse …

Fractal Cross ‘n’ Boxes
Interesting how a very square up-down left-right set of rules produces such diagonal negative space…

Overlaid Fibonacci Spirals
Here are twin nested Fibonacci spirals overlaid with a single blue spiral …

Borromean Rings
They look like they’re tightly knotted, but if you look closely you’ll see that no two rings are linked with each other…

Sleepless Fractal Cross
Just a little fractal cross that appeared in my sketchbook after two days without sleep…

Circle Gasket Snowflake
Can you see the rule behind this 4th-iteration hand-drawn snowflake fractal?

Knotted Circles + Squares
While riding on a plane lately, I found myself drawing lots of knots…

Sierpinski’s Pizza
Dude, where can I get one of those Sierpinski pizza slicers?

Twin Fibonacci Spiral
Taking shape from the world-famous Fibonacci sequence…

Math Medallion Gasket Frame
More fun with gaskets & distorted Sierpinskis.

Circled Sierpinski Tangents
A loose confederation of doodly gaskets and aspiring sierpinski triangles …

Distorted Koch Curve
This one started as a koch curve design, with vertices stretched to fill the rectangular page:

Infinite Doodle
It might not look it, but adding all the details to this drawing took FOREVER.

Binary Gasket Tree (in Bloom)
This one started as a hand-doodled binary tree, but it quickly bloomed Appolonian gaskets between the branches….

Spinning Gasket Spiral Mandala
The triangles point the way…
Hi Marek, I love your math drawings! Do these drawings relax you or induce frustration? Or something in between?
Thanks Lynn. These are drawings I do when I’m procrastinating on other more narrative projects like Freeman Colby’s diary or Nicaragua… I guess they’re more of a meditational practice, sort of like nerd mandalas. ~ M
I absolutely love your work. I’ve enjoyed your blog multiple times so I’ve nominated you for the Very Inspiring Blogger Award. Here’s the post I wrote about it: http://findthefactors.wordpress.com/2014/07/07/very-inspiring-blogger-award/
Thanks very much! 8^D ~ M