Looking at Okuda’s artwork through GeoGebra: A Citizen Science experience

Abstract

In this paper, we describe an experience to test the predominant presence of Delaunay triangulations in the artwork of Okuda, a quite famous, young, contemporary Spanish artist. We addressed this task involving, as a citizen science activity in a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Mathematics) education context, several hundreds of students (of different kinds: secondary education, university undergraduates, in particular, following teacher training degrees). Each student was asked to select an Okuda archive and, with the concourse of a dynamic geometry program provided with some computational geometry commands, to measure the ratio of coincident triangles in Delaunay’s and artist’s triangulations, over an ample region of the chosen artwork. The results show a very large percentage of coincidence ratios. We conclude with some reflections about how to interpret this fact, and about the potential role of future, enhanced, dynamic geometry systems to automatically address similar issues, concerning mathematical properties of figures from the real world.