“But then you have this problem that if you want to prove something general about shapes and then you draw a particular shape on a piece of paper, how do you know that what you’re demonstrating isn’t just an idiosyncrasy of the drawing?” —Matthew Scott, Introduction: On The Diagram
Diagrams is a book that collects 49 diagram drawings made between 2009 and 2014, and includes a conversation-based essay between the artists Christian Kuras and Duncan MacKenzie and the Canadian math scholar, Matthew Scott. These diagrams are an attempt at using the objective visual language of mathematical diagraming to illustrate some of the most important concepts we use to underpin our subjective understanding of the world. In what seems like a hopeless task, the central concern is not how these must inevitably fail to communicate in a truly objective way, but how they might actually succeed.
