Bending and Stretching Classroom Lessons to Make Math Inspire

Ms. Hart — her given name is Victoria, but she has long since dropped the last six letters — has an audacious career ambition: She wants to make math cool.
She effused, “You’re thinking about it, because it’s awesome.”
She calls herself a full-time recreational mathemusician, an off-the-beaten-path choice with seemingly limited prospects. And for most of the two years since she graduated from Stony Brook University, life as a recreational mathemusician has indeed been a meager niche pursuit.
Then, in November, she posted on YouTube a video about doodling in math class, which married a distaste for the way math is taught in school with an exuberant exploration of math as art.
Link to NY Times article
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At first glance, Ms. Hart’s fascination with mathematics might seem odd and unexpected. She graduated with a degree in music, and she never took a math course in college.
At second glance, the intertwining of art and math seems to be the family business. Her father, George W. Hart, builds sculptures based on geometric forms. His day job until last year was as a computer science professor at Stony Brook; he is now chief of content for the Museum of Mathematics, which is looking to open in Manhattan next year.
The summer Ms. Hart was 13, she tagged along with her father to a computational geometry conference. “And I was hooked, immediately,” she said. “It was so different from school, where you are surrounded by this drudgery and no one is excited about it. Any gathering of passionate people is fun, really no matter what they’re doing. And in this case, it was mathematics.”