Jumping into the world of mathematics as a designer seemed to be frightening at the beginning but I opened a new elective course at Bilgi, Design Mathematics. Starting today, I’ll try to log my experiences with the students while we are trying to understand mathematics. The ultimate objective is to find paths that may lead to answering the following question; “what is the relationship between design and math”? Next week, we’ll start with some of the warm-ups and preparatory topics such as number families and number systems, scientific notation… etc. Interestingly Rhino presents a very nice platform to study some of the math topics. We’ll also see its potential in teaching math to designers. I’ll probably use some Rhino Python scripts to introduce the basic operations such as graphing curves. I’ll post those scripts here.

I found these YouTube channels very inspiring:

Mathologer

3Blue1Brown

Coding Math

njwildberger
Here is a more formal introduction to the Design Mathematics course:

Mathematics is the study of abstract generalizations, patterns, and relationships. Mathematical knowledge opens the path of new technologies and paradigms in many fields of science and engineering. As a consequence, it becomes a universal language among these professions. Designers need a minimum of mathematical knowledge. Being a computational designer requires competencies beyond being a good tool user. Because of the chosen multi-disciplinary attitude for the profession. It is becoming increasingly important to understand the underlying mathematical basis before any design tool or method is introduced into this perspective. This course re-introduces the essence of mathematical knowledge to designers. I chose course topics from some of the main topics which are concerned with shape and space. Python programming language will be used to experiment with the essence of the mathematical concepts in digital design workflows.