Mathematics and Art Collide in Professor Fumiko Futamura’s Upcoming Math Playground Project
2026 Southwestern University Teaching Award recipient and Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura is part of a team that recently earned a $150,000 grant to build a math-themed playground in Austin.
Whether we realize it or not, math is omnipresent. Math serves as the foundation of some of the most fundamental elements of our universe, from architecture, fashion, and art, to sports, music, and beyond. Southwestern University Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura is leaning into this phenomenon in her latest project: the Math Playground.
Designed with the ultimate goal of allowing visitors to “play with math,” the Math Playground is an interactive, outdoor installation that transforms abstract mathematical models and concepts into engaging, larger-than-life playground equipment.
“Kids and adults are going to be coming and learning about a variety of mathematical ideas, without knowing what they actually are, just by physically playing, climbing, and swinging,” Futamura said.
The Math Playground concept features five distinct pieces of playground equipment, several of which will be custom built, depending on the project’s budget. Inspired by the Klein Bottle, a surface that has no inside or outside, the first idea is for a looping tubular slide that creates the feeling of a continuous path. A Boy’s Surface climbing net, named after the mathematician Werner Boy, demonstrates the smooth, edge-free immersion of the real projective plane in three-dimensional space, a geometric object that is similar to the Klein Bottle in that it is also one continuous surface with no inside or outside.
A swing set equipped with small sandbags that release sand as the swing moves mimics the Lissajous Curve, a shape that comes from two oscillations happening at the same time. A merry-go-round serves as the foundation for a Zoetrope, a device that uses periodic motion and evenly spaced frames to create the illusion of movement. Finally, an Euler Path, a route that travels each connection exactly once, is envisioned to connect each element of the Math Playground.
“These are not simple ideas,” Futamura said. “They are non-orientable surfaces, complex harmonic motion, and graph theory – things that you wouldn’t ever learn, maybe not even in college.”
Math Playground
(Rendering by Annan Zuo, Courtesy of Jiabao Li)
Math Playground
(Rendering by Annan Zuo, Courtesy of Jiabao Li)
Klein Bottle Slide
(Rendering by Annan Zuo, Courtesy of Jiabao Li)
Boy’s Surface Climbing Nets
(Rendering by Annan Zuo, Courtesy of Jiabao Li)
Lissajous Swing Set
(Rendering by Annan Zuo, Courtesy of Jiabao Li)
Merry-Go-Round Zoetrope
(Rendering by Annan Zuo, Courtesy of Jiabao Li)
Euler Path Walkway
(Rendering by Annan Zuo, Courtesy of Jiabao Li)
The idea behind and concept for the Math Playground was developed by Futamura and her two collaborators, Jiabao Li, an Austin-based artist and Associate Professor at Northeastern University, and Ron Berry, Founder and Co-Artistic Director of the Austin art nonprofit Fusebox. Simons Foundation, whose mission is to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and basic sciences, recently awarded the trio with a $150,000 grant to take the Math Playground from concept to reality.
The grant, awarded by the Simons Foundation’s Science, Society & Culture division, is part of the organization’s Infinite Sums project, a national initiative to “bring math to life through cultural experiences, uncovering its hidden beauty, and letting it inspire and guide us.”
One way that the Simons Foundation hopes to achieve this goal is through its Triangle Program. Designed to bring science and art together to engage with audiences in creative ways, the Triangle Program encourages artists to collaborate with scientists and arts organizations, each representing a side of a triangle.
As the art organization leg of the triangle, Ron Berry solicited the expertise of his friend and collaborator Jiabao Li to serve as the artist. The duo needed a leading mind in math and science to complete their triangle, so Berry turned to a trusted confidant for advice: former Southwestern University President Edward Burger, who eagerly suggested Futamura for the role.
“Jiabao had already worked with a lot of scientists in past collaborations, so her work was already very sciencey, but she had never worked with a mathematician,” Futamura said. “The Triangle Program theme for this year is symmetry, so they thought, ‘let’s find a mathematician,’ and they found me.”
With a strong team in place, Futamura, Berry, and Li became one of just 15 groups in the United States to earn a spot in the ultra-competitive Triangle Program. Divided into two phases, the Triangle Program begins with a process called Open Interval, in which each trio is awarded an initial $30,000 and given several months to brainstorm, exchange ideas, and explore different concepts related to the ultimate goal of bringing math to life.
“She was very much thinking about motherhood and through our conversations, she was interested in the idea of play in mathematics,” Futamura said. “We were playing around with all of these fun math and art ideas, and she thought, ‘wouldn’t it be cool to have a playground where kids can come and play and learn math through play rather than through a lecture?’”
And thus, the concept of the Math Playground was born. With Berry providing practical and logistical support, Futamura and Li hit the ground running with different concepts for the installation. Through collaboration and research, including a visit to the Museum of Illusions, the final designs began to take shape.
“I’m a math professor,” Futamura said. “I like to do art, but I don’t do the kind of art that Jiabao does. She does installations and has interactive spaces and exhibits. I have been fascinated by working with her and seeing her process, by watching an artist actualize works of art. You have a million ideas in your head, but to actually make it a reality and build something is entirely different.”
The Open Interval phase of the Triangle Program culminates with each group submitting a formal proposal for funding to make their idea a reality. In February, Futamura, Berry, and Li learned that they were one of just five groups to earn a $150,000 grant.
With designs complete and funding secured, the trio is currently in the process of determining a location for the Math Playground. The group aims to build the playground in Austin and is working through the regulatory and safety requirements for such an installation.
“Once you have kids in the picture and they’re climbing on it and touching it, from the city’s perspective, it’s not art anymore, it’s a playground,” Futamura said. “It’s in a completely different category with a lot more regulations than a sculpture that’s meant to just be looked at. Everything has to be approved by structural engineers.”
After a site is selected and approved, the group will move into the manufacturing phase, bringing the Math Playground one step closer to reality. In the meantime, Futamura and her collaborators have been sharing the project idea among their respective math, art, and community circles. Futamura recently presented about the Math Playground at the Gathering 4 Gardner Conference, an event that explores ideas and developments in mathematics, magic, illusions, puzzles, philosophy, and rationality.
“They do these lightning talks where you only have six minutes to talk about your thing,” Futamura said. “When I talked about it and showed the renderings, everybody in the audience audibly gasped. Jiabao did a really great job with the renderings to really give the impression of what this work is about and what it can do. Everybody has been really excited about it.”
Being involved with the Math Playground project has been a blending of two passions for Futamura, who has held a longtime interest in exploring the wealth of connections between math and art. In fact, Futamura grew up believing that she would become an artist herself. From a young age, she found joy in drawing, painting, and sculpting. As she began her undergraduate journey at the University of Louisville, she debated whether to pursue an art degree.
However, her educational path ultimately led to mathematics. She earned her bachelor of arts in math before pursuing a master’s of science in mathematics at Vanderbilt University. A Ph.D. soon followed.
“I have always loved the connection between math and art,” she said. “After I became a mathematician, I kept going back to art, trying to figure out how I could incorporate it into what I’m doing. I discovered that there’s a whole community of people who blend math with art. Discovering that community and seeing that there’s so much there, I finally found my place.”
As a professor, she shares this interdisciplinary passion with her students, math majors and non-math majors alike. Her entry-level “Explorations in Math” course explores the role of math in music and art. Through the course, she has witnessed art students becoming interested in math, and math students becoming interested in art.
“In all my classes, whenever we come across some abstract idea, I try to visualize it as much as I can, either through pictures on the board or renderings in a program, just to have them visually understand the concepts,” she said.
Futamura’s upper-level geometry class teaches students the concept of projective geometry through perspective drawing. She recently co-authored an inquiry-based learning textbook for the course, titled Perspective and Projective Geometry , which won the Mathematical Association of America’s 2026 Daniel Solow Author’s Award for outstanding teaching materials.
“We explore all of these interesting ideas that mathematicians developed in the 19th century based all on the idea that perspective is really just a projection – you’re taking points in a three-dimensional space and projecting them onto a two-dimensional space through a point. It’s learning the mathematics behind all of that,” she said.
Months before she received Berry’s invitation to collaborate, Futamura was hard at work co-organizing Southwestern’s 42nd Brown Symposium. With a theme of “Visualizing the Abstract,” the Symposium explored conceptual ideas like mathematics and freedom, which are difficult to express in physical form, through a variety of avenues, from metal, wood, and crochet, to filmmaking, animation, and imagination.
“Being able to do the Brown Symposium really helped me grow,” Futamura said. “I think it fed into the stuff that I’m doing now with Jiabao, being able to think about the visual aspects of math in all the different ways that you can.”
The Brown Symposium featured world-renowned speakers who work with a variety of media to make the intangible more tangible through storytelling, metaphor, and craft. Among the presenters was science writer and artist Margaret Wertheim, who displayed how math is incorporated into material practices around the world, and how it can be regarded as a form of artisanal play, including through her own work crocheting hyperbolic shapes.
“Margaret’s Brown Symposium talk was on embodying mathematics and this idea of being able to model hyperbolic space through crochet,” Futamura said. “There’s a whole community of people learning this abstract, non-Euclidean geometry through making stuff with their hands and really physically embodying those mathematical ideas. That had a really big impact on my thinking leading into the Math Playground.”
Blending art and mathematics through the Math Playground is just one of the many ways that Futamura embodies Southwestern’s Paideia philosophy of identifying connections between the fundamental questions and ideas that shape our world. In fact, it was Paideia that originally brought Futamura to Southwestern as a professor in 2007.
“What really drew me in was the Paideia program,” she said. “There seemed to be an interest in interdisciplinary study. Southwestern very much seemed interested in the art side of me as much as the math side of me, whereas the other places I interviewed were only interested in the math side.”
Nearly 20 years into her tenure at SU, Futamura’s passion for making mathematics accessible continues to shape students both inside and outside the classroom. That commitment was recognized this spring when she received the 2026 Southwestern University Teaching Award, one of the University’s highest faculty honors.
Whether she’s introducing first-year students to the connections between math and art, exploring perspective through geometry, or helping design a playground where visitors unknowingly engage with advanced mathematical concepts, Futamura approaches teaching with the same goal.
“I love being able to talk with students about their passions and their interests, and then showing them that there’s math involved,” she said. “My teaching has veered towards empowering students with math, not just giving them information. That’s the most rewarding part, seeing them light up when they see how math can be actually cool.”
Southwestern University published this content on August 04, 2026, and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed via Public Technologies (PUBT), unedited and unaltered, on August 04, 2026 at 20:21 UTC. If you believe the information included in the content is inaccurate or outdated and requires editing or removal, please contact us at [email protected]
