Math, Artists, and Crop Circles

By Ann Finkbeiner | June 24, 2010 | 1 Comment

Crop circles have moved well past circles. Now they’re jellyfish, dragonflies, and trilobites, drawn using higher math, computers, laser pointers, and GPS’s.  A lovely little essay by a physicist in a recent Nature calls them “modern mathematical artworks” and hopes that this summer will produce a “bumper batch.”   They seem to have no larger meaning, just that they’re quixotic, beautiful, and I thought you’d like them.

Crop circles have been seen for centuries.  How they got there is a little mysterious and has been the subject of a great number of theories:  scientific ones include hill-induced vortices, and less-scientific ones include aliens.  The majority of the circles are not mysterious at all:  they’ve been done by hoaxer/artists and the most recent ones are increasingly mathematical, fractal, and gorgeous.  The artists work in teams and use some of the same math that nature uses — like the golden ratio — to create the same designs nature does.

The physicist’s essay has an odd little tone, a combination of highly specific detail about the history and math, and vagueness about artists and techniques — as though the author doesn’t want crop circles giving up all their mystery.  Or maybe, because the circles are done so quickly and secretly and last so briefly, the author really doesn’t know.

The internet turns up beautiful pictures of the circles, but the sites tend to have the words in their addresses that don’t encourage belief in the reliability of either the sites’ information or the sources for the pictures.

Photo: top -  Wikimedia Commons; bottom – Hansueli Krapf

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