Carina Letong Hong
Carina Letong Hong is a Rhodes Scholar studying towards an MSc in Neuroscience and a DPhil in Mathematics. Winning the Rhodes Scholarship has allowed Carina time to reflect on the value of collaborative work and branch out to explore new areas and disciplinary interests.
Entangled Threads: Finding Beauty in the Unknown
Carina has collaborated with Nicola Green to create an artwork inspired by the beauty and interrelatedness of her scholarly work in pure mathematics and its applications across multiple fields of research including neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. This artwork draws inspiration from Carina’s work in number theory. Prime numbers are fundamental to our understanding of the universe and may provide solutions to many of the challenges we face in the future including artificial intelligence and security.
This piece depicts a spiral pattern known as the Ulam spiral that is made when plotting the distribution of prime numbers. The beauty of these patterns lies in their mystery, and for Carina the excitement of mathematics research lies in our attempts to better understand these mysteries. Each dot represents a prime number in space and has been embellished by hand with diamond dust. Nicola chose this method to not only emphasise the enigmatic quality of the design but to convey the idea that there is a beauty and infinite value in exploring complex ideas, our shared difficult histories and our entangled stories.
Tapestry: Black Box
This artwork depicts a set of colourful neurons which relates to Carina’s current research interest in computational neuroscience. The reciprocal relationship between neuroscience and artificial intelligence represents the cutting edge of scientific discovery.
Nicola and Carina also hope to use this artwork to champion and celebrate women in STEM and to highlight the importance of representation.