Philip Ording, Sarah Lawrence College

Abstract: This talk will present joint research with Brenda Danilowitz on Geometry for Artists, a workshop that Max Dehn developed in the late 1940s at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. An unusual blend of projective and descriptive geometries, the course reflected the experimental college’s avant garde late modernist legacy as well as Dehn’s ongoing philosophical investigations into the common roots of mathematics and ornamentation.