INTRODUCTION

For the last three years, a team in the School of Mathematics at the University of Wales, Bangor, has been designing the exhibition Mathematics and Knots, which was exhibited in the Pop Maths Roadshow in Leeds, 1989, concurrently with the ICMI Seminar. In this paper we explain what we were attempting to achieve, and the problems we had in getting to this stage.

We do not claim to have achieved all our aims, or to have reached a final version. The exhibition will be useful if it is enjoyed by the public and by mathematicians. We hope it will also stimulate others to think about the problems of exhibition design in mathematics and to encourage them to prepare for themselves presentations of mathematics in a variety of topics and media.

HOW IT BEGAN

Our involvement in making a mathematical exhibition came about in the following way.

One of us (R.B.) was invited to give a Popular Lecture on knots, one of two lectures in an evening, for June, 1984. It seemed a good idea to have material to display in the foyer for people to view when they arrived and in the coffee interval. Coloured enlargements were made of slides of knots in art and in history, and also a few of the overhead transparencies used in the lecture were enlarged to A3 size. All this material, and some models of knots made of copper tubing, was rather randomly distributed over some display boards.