ABSTRACT
The title ‘Common Threads’ was a deliberate play on words chosen to illustrate the shades of meaning in the exhibition’s message. Thus, the word ‘common’ was used in the sense of ordinary, everyday, as well as in the sense of being widespread. The word ‘threads’ referred to the yarns of knitting, the silk of embroidery the grasses of a basket, and the warp and weft of weaving. But it also implied the developmental strands of mathematics, both the vertical paths through which an area of mathematics develops in depth, and the horizontal links between various branches of the discipline. In keeping with the cloth analogy, ‘Common Threads’ represented a seamless robe of mathematical activity within a very ordinary part of anyone’s daily life, anywhere on earth.
