As Sarah Kinney wraps up her junior year at Southwestern, she has found a creative way to combine her love of math and her love of painting through an oil painting that features three pineapples partially whited out with varying degrees of transluscent squares.

The painting, titled 0,1,1,3,5,8,13,  “presents the complex relationship between nature, mathematics and art,” Kinney said. “The subject matter is chosen because of the pineapple’s close relation to the Fibonacci Sequence, a mathematical idea in which two numbers are added together  to create the next number. This creates a randomly generated and yet remarkably rational pattern that is reminiscent of fractals, and helps us understand the subtle interactions between mathematics and the natural world.”

From paintings to musical scores to research on the recently discovered Georgetown Salamander, Southwestern students have been hard at work this semester on projects for the annual Student Works Symposium, which will be held April 9. The symposium will feature 96 exhibitions, posters and oral presentations from across 19 disciplines.

Oral presentations will take place from 5 to 6 p.m. and 8 to 9 p.m. in various rooms throughout the Campus Center. Students will give a total of 48 presentations ranging from marble mermaids to conflict resolution in Northern Ireland. Among these will be junior Brooke Chatterton speaking on student loans. “Outstanding student loan debt has ballooned in recent years, reaching over $1 trillion,” she said. “The amount of debt has reached unsustainable levels, which necessitates systematic changes. Future economic growth and stability may be sacrificed if change is not made.”

Musical performances begin at 6 p.m. in the Bishop’s Lounge, and include an original composition by Jeffrey McKenzie and performed by McKenzie, William Danheim, Jenna Gaska, Stacie Glowka and Erin Weber. This music was written as a sountrack to the 1905 silent film Rescued by Rover, which will be shown during the performance,and is scored for violin, cello and piano.

Senior Art Exhibitions and Advanced Painting Exhibitions will open at 6:30 p.m. in the Jim and Pat Walzel Lobby located in the Sarofim School of Fine Arts. These include Kinney’s work, as well as senior art projects from Jessica Cox, Kim Dembrosky and Rebecca Gordon. Dembrosky’s artwork employs the use of weather patterns to create a color-coded system hand painted onto tile. “I question our relationship to the natural environment,” she said. “Doing so creates brightly colored, geometric patterns dictated by the chance happenings of nature.”

Poster presentations and other creative works and exhibitions begin at 7 p.m. in the Bishop’s Lounge. These include many studies on the Georgetown Salamander, as well as the effects of Hatha yoga on stress, student tardiness, how Starbucks influences the distribution of other coffee shops in Austin and many more.

The symposium will conclude with the continuation of oral presentations. To see the complete schedule, visit http://www.southwestern.edu/academics/studentworks/

−Devin Corbitt