Margaret Wertheim
Margaret Wertheim is a science writer and artist. She is the author of The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet, and 6 other books. She and her sister Christine Wertheim are co-creators of the Crochet Coral Reef, the world's largest art+science project, shown at the 58th Venice Biennale, Helsinki Biennial, and many other venues. The sisters' generative practice has engaged over 20,000 citizen-participants in making a globe-spanning archipelago of woolly coral reefs in 50 cities and countries, including Chicago, New York, London, Melbourne, Germany, Finland, Latvia, and the UAE. www.crochetcoralreef.org. Her personal site is: www.margaretwertheim.com
In 2021 when Mark Zuckerberg launched his multibillion-dollar initiative to develop “the metaverse,” a term and concept gleaned from Neal Stephenson’s kinetic cyberpunk classic Snow Crash, the venture capitalist Matthew Ball explained the idea as “the successor state to the mobile internet.”
“To figure: to form or shape, to trace, to reckon or calculate, to represent in a diagram or picture, to ornament or adorn with a design or pattern.” Thus the Oxford English Dictionary defines the act of figuring, a word equally resonant in mathematics, science and art.
