Human migration is a topic that has commanded numerous column inches and news time in the past few years, and will probably continue to do so for some years to come.  However, it is also a subject that suffers from misrepresentation and sensationalism: our perception of migration is heavily skewed by stereotypes that, aided by media reporting, have come to dominate our opinions at the expense of reliable data and statistics.

Chalkdust, a magazine for the mathematically curious (www. chalkdustmagazine.com), therefore developed an exhibit partly to challenge some of these perceptions and partly to show the application of mathematics in the social sciences and highlight the links between different fields of mathematics, thereby hopefully furthering the magazine’s goal of raising awareness of the beauty and importance of maths.

In particular, the exhibit shows how Newton’s discovery of gravity in 1687 has recently been applied to model migration, as well as other social behaviours such as trade.

The BatWing sculpture represents a tangible way to approach mathematics. The sculpture, based on a triple periodic minimal surface, physically expresses the forces inside the structure to give visitors an appeal to applied geometry solutions.