The Pride of Bath and the Kingswood Lion

The Art department is very proud to be involved in this year’s Pride of Bath exhibition. Staff and lower school scholars worked hard together to complete the project in what was a short term. The laborious process of creating the octagonal shapes took a great deal of care and involved numerous rolls of masking tape and blue stained fingers! 

When Mr Main and Mr Musto discussed the Lion and its proposed location in Bath, they examined whether the octagonal design could be represented in numerical form as well as graphically through the eight sided pattern covering the lion's body. People are often aware of square numbers meaning the number of pebbles that one could arrange to make a square, and similarly those who watch snooker are aware of triangular numbers when examining the number of reds at the start of a frame. However, octagonal numbers are their lesser-known cousins.

Generally an octagonal number is a number that represents an octagon. The octagonal number for n is given by the formula 3n² - 2n. The first five octagonal numbers are 1, 8, 21, 40, and 65, and can be seen visually below;

This method of categorizing numbers using geometric shapes was developed by ancient Greek mathematicians over two thousand years ago. We hope that Pythagoras would have approved of our lion!

We would like to thank Mr Musto and the Mathematics department for their assistance in the design process. Everyone is very excited about seeing ‘Mathmaticat’ standing proudly in position in Milsom Place this summer .

Cameron Main
Head of Art