Notices by Ele Willoughby, PhD (minouette@spore.social)

Happy birthday to Marjorie Rice (née Jeuck, 1923–2017) who discovered 4 new pentagonal tilings of the Euclidian plane!

The San Diego mother of 5 (6th died in infancy) completed half a correspondence art course after high school & had no training as a #mathematician but was always interested in #math & art. She began to follow SciAm writer/amateur mathematician Martin Gardner’s column, rushing to devour the magazine before her 🧵

#womenInSTEM #printmaking #mathematics #linocut #tiling #MastoArt

Happy birthday to Queen Seondeok of Silla (c. 595 ~ 610 - 647), 27th ruler of one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, from 632-647, who brought about a renaissance in culture and science and built the Cheomseongdae moon and star-gazing observatory.

Known for her intelligence, wisdom & benevolence, stories survive of her curiosity & cleverness even as a child. When her father the King was gifted peony seeds from China 🧵

#linocut #printmaking #sciart #histsci #womenInSTEM #Seondeok #MastoArt

An extraordinary American astronaut and science communicator for #BlackHistoryMonth: Mae Carol Jemison (born October 17, 1956) is a physician who became the first Black woman to travel in space when she went into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour for NASA, on September 12, 1992. She also has a B.S. in chemical engineering, served in the Peace Corps, is a dancer and choreographer, formed and runs her 🧵
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#linocut #printmaking #sciArt #astronaut #womenInSTEM #BlackInSTEM #histsci #MastoArt

This #BlackHistoryMonth let’s celebrate trailblazing American #biochemist Marie Maynard Daly (1921-2003), 1st Black woman to earn a PhD in #chemistry in the US! She made important research contributions to the biochemisty of the cell nucleus & cardiovascular issues & our knowledge of the chemistry of histones & protein synthesis. She published original research establishing that “no bases other than adenine, 🧵

#womenInSTEM #BlackInSTEM #histsci #printmaking #linocut #HeartDisease #sciArt

Happy birthday to Kathleen Lonsdale DBE FRS (née Yardley, 1903-1971) who solved a longstanding #chemistry conundrum of the shape of benzene, here with her drawing of electron density for hexachlorobenzene (green) & model of hexamethylbenzene explore shape in different forms. Her husband said, “Before prison it might have bothered her to go to Buckingham Palace. Afterwards, Holloway or Buckingham Palace were all the same.” 🧵1/n

#womenInSTEM #linocut #printmaking #histsci #MastoArt

Happy #SquirrelAppreciationDay! Despite the opinion of some people in my home there’s a colony of white squirrels in Toronto’s Trinity-Bellwood Park! I know. I’ve seen them, This is a portrait of one of them, climbing head-down a maple tree, along with the words “Legendary White Squirrel of Trinity-Bellwoods”, which I carved & printed in dark, silver-bronze, with redish-pink eyes, on Japanese kozo paper. 🧵
#linocut #printmaking #squirrel #whiteSquirrel #Toronto #MastoArt #typography

Thinking about fossil marine invertebrates that Keilan-Jaworowska studied at the beginning of her career, made me think of this pattern made from my linocut animal prints with collaged washi papers from the Cambrian Period (from 538.8 million to 485.4 million years ago). 🧵

https://www.spoonflower.com/en/fabric/16990670-cambrian-sea-by-minouette

#linocut #printmaking #pattern #surfaceDesign #paleontology #sciArt #Cambrian #BurgessShale #trilobite #wiwaxia #Opabinia #InverteFest #invertebrate #fossils #MastoArt

Working on my next linocut for the #printerSolstice prompt carbon! A geochemist for my ongoing series of #womenInSTEM portraits.

Katsuko Saruhashi (1920-2007) made the first measurements of CO2 in seawater.

#linocut #printmaking #wip #ReliefPrint #EarthScience #sciart #MastoArt

Another unknown birthday: Amongst the earliest recorded woman in #mathematics, Hypatia lived during the 3rd century AD in Alexandria, Egypt, which was part of the Roman Empire. She was born at some time between about 350 and 370 and died in 415 C.E. She taught philosophy, #astronomy and mathematics at a NeoPlatonist school. She believed in empiricism and natural law. 🧵1/n

#sciart #linocut #printmaking #womeninstem #geometry #histsci #astrolabe #MastoArt

For the final #InsertAnInvert2024 prompt “diving” and for #invertefest this is a hand-printed of the Paroster pallescens beetle, surface diving water beetle from Australia. It is printed on 8” x 8” Japanese paper.

Paroster is a genus of beetles in the family Dytiscidae. I really liked the look of this beetle and the amazing diversity of this genus of Australian diving beetles!

https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/1793686974

#linocut #printmaking #insect #beetle #entomology #divingBeetle #sciart #MastoArt

signal potential mates leaving their tell-tale trail of a j-shaped flash pattern. Hence the common name “big dipper firefly”. Their twilight glow and flashing light can look quite magical!

🧵2/2

For the last day of 2024, #InverteFest, #InsertAnInvert2024 wildcard: This linocut shows three fireflies (Photinus pyralis, the common eastern firefly or big dipper firefly) in a field against the night sky. These bioluminescent insects are the most common firefly in North America and they use the light organ on their abdomen to 🧵1/2

#linocut #printmaking #washi #collage #fireflies #bioluminescence #sciart #insect #glowInTheDark #InverteFest2024 #MastoArt

For the #InsertAnInvert2024 prompt flyer, #artadventCalendar and #invertefest this final week of the year: my kaleidoscope of butterflies. Kaleidoscope is the wonderful name or term of venery for a group of butterflies so I designed this print to match the symmetrical images you can see in a kaleidoscope. There are three each of the orange Isabella’s Longwings (Nymphalidae Eueides isabella), 🧵1/2
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#printmaking #sciart #butterflies #MastoArt #typography #termsofvenery #insect

Day 18 #ArtAdventCalendar: my #linocut of Slavic #fairytale Vasilisa the Beautiful with the skull lantern. Before her mother’s death, she gave Vasilisa a wooden doll & told her to keep it secret & with her always & whenever she needed help or comfort to offer the doll food & water & seek her help & the doll would provide. The doll helped her with her grief after her mother’s death. 🧵1/n

#folktale #linocut #printmaking #VasilisaTheBeautiful #BabaYaga #illustration #MastoArt

#ArtAdventCalendar day 14: a print I made the 4th #FolktaleWeek2024 prompt trail. I thought of the fairytale Hans My Hedgehog, who knew all the right trails. I love the absurdity of a half-hedgehog man riding a rooster and playing the bagpipes.

His parents desperately wanted a child, and his father foolishly wished for “even a hedgehog”; his wife gives birth to a baby who’s hedgehog from the waist up. 🧵

#linocut #printmaking #fairytale #HansMyHedgehog #illustration #folktaleWeek2024 #MastoArt

Bonus #artAdventCalendar: Happy birthday to #mathematician Virginia Ragsdale (1870-1945). The Ragsdale conjecture, made in her 1906 dissertation, is amongst the earliest & most famous on the #topology of real & algebraic curves, which stimulated a lot of 20th century research & was not disproved until ‘79. A correct upper bound has yet to be found. In her dissertation she tackles the 16th of David Hilbert’s famous 23 unsolved problems in mathematics 🧵

#womeninSTEM #printmaking #sciart #mathart

Day 11 #ArtAdventCalendar: Happy birthday to trailblazing US #astronomer Annie Jump Cannon (1863 – 1941), here with her stellar classification system which sorted stars based on spectral types, revealing their temperature from hot blue to cool red stars: O,B,A, F, G, K & M. Named the Harvard Classification after the university, her tremendous contribution was less visible.
🧵1/n

#printmaking #womenInSTEM #histsci #DisabledInSTEM #linocut #MastoArt

Bonus #ArtAdventCalendar:

Happy birthday to Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), who published the first computer program. She worked together with Charles Babbage, the inventor of the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine (the first computers), correcting his notes on how to calculate Bernoulli Numbers with the Analytical Engine. More importantly, 🧵1/n

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#sciart #linocut #printmaking #mathematics #mathart #compsci #programming #histsci #WomenInSTEM #technology

For #ArtAdventCalendar Day 4: Years ago I made a print called ‘Turtles, all the way down’ for an art show about cosmology, where the expression is used as a metaphor for infinity regress. This echos origin myths that the Earth is supported on the back of the World Turtle. Though ostensibly about astrophysics, I took the opportunity to depict many species of turtles to celebrate their biodiversity. 🧵

#linocut #printmaking #turtles #sciArt #conservation #endangeredSpecies #biodiversity #MastoArt

Bonus #ArtAdventCalendar: The first in my series of somewhat darker holiday folklore: my linocut Yule Cat, Jólakötturinn of Iceland, a gigantic monster cat looming over a tiny cabin, with a wreath on the door, in a snowy, nighttime woodland scene.

The first written accounts of Jólakötturinn, enforcer of good behaviour leading up to Christmas, date to the 19th century but the stories of the monster cat likely date 🧵

#linocut #printmaking #Yule #YuleCat #Iceland #folklore #legend #cat #MastoArt