Norton Starr is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Department of Mathematics, Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, USA.
He does not identify himself primarily as a visual artist but as a mathematician using computer graphics to illustrate mathematical functions with variables and basic graphs within a spiral design. A lot of his artistic work was developed in 1972-1973, during a sabbatical taken at the computer center of the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
Many of his compositions illustrating functions of two variables have appeared in various texts in mathematics and in computer science.
Starr came to Amherst from MIT, where he earned a Ph.D. in mathematics, served as an instructor and received the Goodwin Medal for “conspicuously effective teaching.”
Named a full professor at Amherst in 1978, Starr has taught courses in advanced calculus, complex variables, probability, statistics and data analysis, among other subjects. He also taught a first-year seminar in computers and society.
Seven of his geometric works were included in the Herbert W. Franke Collections that were acquired by Kunsthalle Bremen in 2006.
