Math and Creative Arts: Caribbean Carnival Expressions

This summer we will explore the ways that Caribbean Carnival Festivals can combine creative arts and mathematical skills. Geometry can be used to analyze and understand the intricate costume designs. Techniques such as measuring, approximating, and replicating can be used to create scale models and otherwise help with designing and planning. Numerical constructs such as ratios and other fractions come to life in the context of planning for participation in festival activities.

We will investigate the ideas of patterns and symmetry – how these ideas incorporate aspects of past and future festival costume designs, fabric patterns found in Caribbean traditional textiles. We will also use Carnival and Caribbean festival arts as a place of grounding for examining abstract and concrete mathematical concepts.

The theme that will guide the carnival costume design work and mathematical thinking will be hurricane, global warming, and rising sea levels. 

All reading materials will be posted on the course Canvas site. Artists – painters, musicians, poets – use these concepts in their work. Each student will find examples and present them in class. A final project will be to investigate and report on how Caribbean art and mathematics are found and used in everyday life or to create a piece of art that incorporates these ideas. In all cases, students will identify the mathematics involved in the concepts they have found and/or made.

8 - Mathematics of Symmetry