math awareness posters

    

The Unesco announced the year 2000 as the "World mathematical year". Among others Unesco and European Mathematical Society held a poster competition. Look for the third price - a series of posters by Nadja Kutz. The posters were displayed in the .Brussels metro and in schools in Belgium, France and Sweden. Unfortunately they are sold out by now.

Story:

The three displayed posters of Kutz were intended for typical street/subway situations, where people usually do not stop to read a poster, but merely perceive the message within a twinkle of the eye. That is, the visual content of the posters ought to be simply structured and the text parts as catchy as possible. This gave way to the idea of using a more or less "real life situation" as background and "distorting" the displayed reality by superimposing beautiful mathematical objects. Besides the visual demands, the guiding leitmotiv for this idea was that the posters should reflect in a playful way the fact that the perception of reality is altered by mathematical knowledge.

The posters contain mathematical objects, which were generated at the TU Berlin math department by Tim Hoffmann, Matthias Heil and Konrad Polthier. All three gave a written permission for using the objects within the poster campaign of WMY2000.