If you’re the only child of an engineer father and a financial analyst mother, there’s a good chance that you and Heather Gordon might agree on something: “I think numbers are beautiful,” she says. A lover of algorithms and an “analog junkie,” Gordon strives to tell stories about personal relationships using geometry, numbers, and code — she transformed a portion of Crime and Punishment into the computer code ASCII — and asymmetrical origami shapes, some large enough to walk through. Never mind the math. Just appreciate the genius.
Heather Gordon translates numbers into oil paintings like Last Woman Standing (above), a data portrait of her mother, which maps the distances between all of the places she’s lived.