Margaret Wertheim

Margaret Wertheim (born 20 August 1958) is an Australian-born science writer, curator, and artist based in the United States. She is the author of books on the cultural history of physics, and has written about science, including for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Guardian, Aeon and Cabinet. Wertheim and her twin sister, Christine Wertheim, are co-founders of the Institute For Figuring (IFF), a Los Angeles–based non-profit organization through which they create projects at the intersection of art, science and mathematics. Their IFF projects include their Crochet Coral Reef, which has been shown at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Hayward Gallery (London), Museum of Arts and Design (NYC), and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. For her work with public science engagement, Wertheim won the 2016 Klopsteg Memorial Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers and Australia's Scientia Medal.

Education and research

Wertheim's education includes two bachelor's degrees, a Bachelor of Science in pure and applied physics from the University of Queensland and a Bachelor of Arts in pure mathematics and computing from the University of Sydney.

Wertheim has been a research associate at the American Natural Museum of Natural History located in New York, and is a fellow at the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. She is currently a PhD candidate and researcher at Deakin University. She was the Discovery Fellow (2012-2013) at the University of Southern California, as well as the Vice Chancellor's Fellow (2015) at the University of Melbourne.

Career

Books

Wertheim is the author of a trilogy that considers the role of theoretical physics in the cultural landscape of modern Western society. The first, Pythagoras' Trousers, is a history of the relationship between physics, religion and gender relations. Reviewing the book in The Independent, Jenny Turner writes that the introduction states the book's argument elegantly and compellingly; but the text disappointed her by losing sight of what Turner thought its most interesting goal, telling how physics has been motivated by "fantasies of universal mastery". The book offered a critique of sexism in science and proposed systemic historical reasons why physics has been so un-open to women since its inception in Pythagorean principles 2500 years ago.

The second, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, charts the history of scientific thinking about space from Dante to the Internet. The thesis of the book is that our conceptions of human selfhood are intimately entwined with our conceptions of space, and when our concepts of space change so do our views about the "self." In the medieval schema, there were two spaces of being: the physical space of the Earth, planets and stars, and the spiritual domain of Heaven and Hell. Here "man" was conceived as a creature of both body and soul, each aspect operating within its parallel realm. With the advent of a Newtonian cosmos and its purely physical depiction of space, "man" came to be envisioned as a solely material being. In the 1990s, the coming into being of cyberspace – to use William Gibson's term – ushered in a claim that this ethereal domain would re-open possibilities for activation of a spiritual side of our selves. Wertheim refutes this claim, and the book offered an early challenge to visions of cyber-utopia. Andrew Leonard, reviewing the book for The New York Times, calls Wertheim's thesis "ambitious and fascinating." Leonard finds her account of the evolution of physicists' concept of space impressive, but expresses the view that ultimately she loses faith in her thesis of cyberspace as a spiritual realm: even if there is, indeed, something human about a great network of relationships that "cannot be captured by an equation or a telescope".

The third, Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything, looks at the idiosyncratic world of "outsider physicists" such as Jim Carter, people with little or no scientific training who develop their own alternative theories of the universe. Freeman Dyson, reviewing the book in The New York Review of Books, notes that it describes research by amateurs, who "offer an alternative set of visions ... concrete rather than abstract, physical rather than mathematical." The leading character is Jim Carter, a man with an "unshakable belief" in a theory of the whole universe constructed of "endless hierarchies of circlons", circular mechanical objects that reproduce and split like smoke rings.

Television

Wertheim has scripted 10 television documentaries, as well as created and co-directed the award-winning series Catalyst, a six-part science and technology series for a teenage audience. She has produced several short films, and she wrote and directed the interactive Canadian public health program What About AIDS (1988), an early use of laser-disc technology. Wertheim lectures around the globe promoting science within a social justice context.

Through their work with IFF, the Wertheim sisters have created exhibitions on scientific and mathematical themes at art galleries and science museums around the world, including the 2019 Venice Biennale, Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Wertheim’s use of crochet in the piece is largely due to Daina Taimina's discovery of the potential manifestation of the Impossible Hyperbolic Structure within the confines of the medium. The piece pays homage to the female mathematician who used a traditionally women's medium to redefine the course of the study as a whole. She is quoted as saying, "So here, in wool, through a domestic, feminine art, is the proof that the most famous postulate in mathematics is wrong". In this way, the piece not only comments on mathematics and climate change, but also feminism. As of early 2020, more than 10,000 people from New York and London, to Riga and Abu Dhabi, have actively contributed pieces to Crochet Coral Reef exhibitions in more than 40 cities and countries. More than two million people have seen these shows. In the foreword to the Crochet Coral Reef book, Donna Haraway calls the project "palpable, polymorphous, powerful and terrifying stitchery". Wertheim was invited to speak about the project in a Ted Talk in February 2009. and has surpassed 1.3 million views on the Ted website.

Since its beginning in 2005, Crochet Coral Reef has expanded into a constellation of individual reefs including a Bleached Reef, a Toxic Reef made of video-tape and plastic, a Branched Anemone Garden, and a giant Coral Forest – consisting of six large-scale sculptures, three crocheted from yarn and three from plastic. The plastic works are inspired by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a gigantic gyre of plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean.

Mosely Snowflake Sponge project

Inspired by and working with Jeannine Mosely, a software engineer and origami artist, Margaret Wertheim curated a project at the University of Southern California to create a giant model of a fractal, constructed from 48,912 business cards. Professors, librarians, local artists, school students, and hundreds of USC students all participated in over 3,000 hours of work to complete this object. Discovered by Dr. Mosely in 2006, the Mosely snowflake is a cousin of the famous Menger sponge, the first three-dimensional fractal known to mathematicians which was first described by Karl Menger in 1926, and which Wertheim and Mosely also modelled physically at the Institute for Figuring. The Mosely Snowflake Sponge at USC was the first-ever instantiation of this new fractal form, and has since been reproduced by other groups around the world, including in Madagascar. On display at the University of Southern California's Doheny Memorial Library, the completed Mosely Snowflake Sponge fractal was constructed out of specially designed business cards coloured in the USC Trojans' palette of scarlet and gold, and using several geometric designs taken from the Oliver Byrne version of Euclid's Elements.

Awards and honours

Print Journalism Award (2006) from the American Institute of Biological Sciences Theo Westenberger Award (2011) from the Autry Museum Discovery Fellow at the University of Southern California (2012-2013) Scientia Medal (2017)

Books

Physics trilogy Pythagoras' Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender Wars (1995) The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet (1999) Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons and Alternative Theories of Everything (2011)

Guides and catalogs A Field Guide to Hyperbolic Space (2005) A Field Guide to the Business Card Menger Sponge (2006) An Alternative Guide to the Universe: Mavericks, Outsiders, Visionaries. Exhibition catalog, Hayward Gallery, edited by Ralph Rugoff. (2013) Crochet Coral Reef with Christine Wertheim (2015)

Exhibitions

Margaret and Christine Wertheim. Value and Transformation of Corals, Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden (29 January – 26 June 2022)