Wallpaper Memories by Philip Ording, 2026
Wallpaper Memories combines elements from independent publications by two mathematicians, Alexandre Borovik (b. 1956) and George Pólya (1887–1985). Borovik, for his essay “Being in Control” (2017), gathered colleagues’ memories of their childhood encounters with mathematics. Sixteen are reproduced here, each followed by an illustration labeled with the colleague’s initials. The seventeenth and last memory, of a fugitive mouse, comes from Pólya’s book Mathematical Discovery (1965). His paper “On the Analog of Crystal Symmetry in the Plane” (1924) is the source of the seventeen wallpaper patterns that appear on the cover of Wallpaper Memories and throughout its pages.
Philip Ording is a mathematician and writer based in New York.