North Words: Math could be inventive and enjoyable if you use cats to clarify it

Look is a math professor at St. Lawrence University, where he specializes in a field called complex dynamics. And he lives in Potsdam with his four cats – Spaghettios, Meow Meow, Mrs. Waffles, and Conan T. Cat, all of whom make cameos in the new book. And while his previous publications, such as “Sequence of complex radius values that yield capture Sierpiński curve Julia sets for n-circle inversion,” from Topology Proceedings, Vol. 64, might not speak to the average reader, “Math Cats” is written for all of us.

Through its short chapters and fun illustrations, Look uses cats as the entry point to explain the workings and the relevance of math concepts such as the Pythagorean Theorem and Fibonacci’s Sequence – and even make them more fun than we might remember from high school classes.

Look chatted with North Words host Mitch Teich and producer Ethan Shantie about the nine lives of his book, and about why there is more art and creativity to math than we might imagine.

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