by CHRIS BARRY

Name: Dan Hambleton

Age: 22

Occupation: “Math furniture” designer

Bio: This industrious Plateau hunk and reputed math genius was first introduced to the glory of numbers by his mathematician father shortly after learning how to use the toilet sans supervision. “Our father-son moments were all about numbers theory—inverse trigonometric functions and things like that. It kind of laid a good foundation for me.” Currently in his final year as an undergrad studying pure mathematics at McGill, for the past little while, Dan, a former child circus performer, has been designing furniture based on “complex mathematical systems which in turn produce unique shapes” formerly unknown to this universe. “I find myself thinking about this a lot: is mathematics really art?”

Huh? What the hey is “math furniture?” “Through a process called math visualization I end up with shapes that are very strange conceptually—they have no bearing at all on real life, they don’t exist in any real sense. So I take these shapes, visualize them in a three-dimensional environment, and, depending on where I start from, I’ll end up with these objects in a three-dimensional space. If any of these patterns resemble, say, a chair, or a table or something, I’ll develop my furniture designs from there.”

Is it tricky finding craftspeople capable of working with his nutty designs? Not so much, given that Dan builds his own prototypes with the help of his good bud Jon. “But yeah, if I brought this stuff elsewhere, they’d probably think I was out of my mind. We definitely do have to sort through real problems with standard carpentry though, like, how do you actually go about building one of these math desks?”

Where to buy Dan’s furniture: Nowhere, for the moment, although Dan expects some of his designs will be on the market within the next year or so.

How he wound up working in a travelling circus: “I was around 11 years old and my mum pretty well threw me into circus school because we had just moved to Germany and she figured I didn’t have enough friends.”

Was he employed in the circus freak show, a “watch this weird Canadian child solve complicated algebra problems off the top of his head” kind of thing? “Uh, no. I learned to juggle and ride a unicycle and stuff and it just sort of took off from there. I did juggling mainly. I could juggle five balls at a time then.”

Something that happens to kids once they take up juggling: They find themselves mercilessly ridiculed by their peers. “In Germany it was fine, but when I came home to Canada the other kids just wouldn’t let up about it. I heard about it for, like, 10 years after, they all thought my juggling was the biggest joke in the world.”

Where you might find him boozin’: The Distillery.

Childhood ambition: To become a labourer.

Last book read: Testament, by Nino Ricci.

Musical preferences: Medeski, Martin and Wood, Metallica.

Words of wisdom: “Question everything.”

Comments? dimwit@hdot.net