Last weekend, the Ithaca area combined the powers of math, art and science to celebrate the second annual Light in Winter festival. People from Minnesota to Buffalo attended the 11 events around town, including samba workshops and a screening of the controversial 1927 piece “Ballet Mecanique.”

Barbara Mink, the festival’s artistic director, said the events resulted in great work no one could have predicted.

“Even though I’ve worked on it all year, some of the things that came out were just unexpected and wonderful,” she said. Marching to the beat of the drum

Thirty minutes before the samba workshop began, nearly all the chairs inside the Women’s Community Building were empty. Five minutes into the program, however, there wasn’t an empty seat in the house.

The workshop, held Saturday morning, taught people the history of samba music and how to play and dance to the upbeat music. It featured live performances by Deixa Sambar, Cornell University’s samba band and Manhattan Samba, the premiere samba group in New York City. Cleibe Souza, frontman for Deixa Sambar, led most of the workshop. He saw the Manhattan Samba concert the night before at the State Theatre. The show was the first time he saw the group perform and it only made him more excited to play with them on Saturday.

“[Playing with Manhattan Samba was] awesome, really professional,” Souza said. “They really know what they’re doing.”

A little over halfway into the workshop Souza introduced Ivo Araujo, director and master percussionist of Manhattan Samba. Members of Manhattan Samba and Deixa Sambar mingled with the crowd and were more than happy to help with a rhythm or dance step.

Souza taught the audience some basic rhythms, and the crowd even participated in a call and response session.

Marie Anne de Roos, an Ithaca resident, began the event on a drum she borrowed from a friend and ended up dancing as she played a set of bells.

“It was terrific,” she said. “Each instrument has a different basic rhythm and [Araujo] could show us and manipulate it.” Colors collide with insects

While the audience members danced the samba downtown, ushers at Cornell University’s Statler Auditorium dispensed paper glasses with prism-like lenses for a presentation titled “The Alchemy of Color.”

Jerrold Meinwald, professor of chemical biology at Cornell, began the presentation, saying that light waves have a broader spectrum than humans can see.

“We are right in the middle of that range looking at things,” he said.

As the lights went out, the audience put on the paper glasses to further show the diffraction of color. Meinwald switched on purple, yellow and orange neon fluorescent lights. Similar to when a prism separates white light into a rainbow, the glasses separated the “spectral lights.”

During the next presentation, Thomas Eisner, professor of neurobiology at Cornell, said that bees, which see all colors but red, also can see ultraviolet light. This is how they tell one plant from another.

He also showed how insects use camouflage in nature. One picture showed a caterpillar that sews flower petals onto its back using silk.

Unfortunately for the insect, there’s a difference in ultraviolet light patterns depending on which direction the petals are facing. Eisner said if the caterpillar sewed a petal opposite than that of the surrounding petals, any insect able to see in ultraviolet light would be able to find its prey. String quartet evokes emotion

Just as ultraviolet light exposes hidden insects, similarly, music evokes hidden emotion.

Music’s emotional effect on listeners was the topic of “Music and Meaning,” a lecture featuring music psychologist Carol Krumhansl and Ithaca College’s Ariadne String Quartet at the Statler Auditorium Saturday morning.

The presentation focused on the first movement of Beethoven’s Op. 132, String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, a piece which has always been of interest to music psychologists due to its complex and frequently changing moods, Krumhansl said.

“At times [the piece] feels a little schizophrenic,” said cellist Elizabeth Simkin, associate professor of music performance at Ithaca College.

Krumhansl had conducted a study of the piece, playing it for a group of 12 Cornell undergraduate students who recorded their emotional reactions to each section of the movement. Krumhansl referred to seven different musical “topics” including the Gavotte, a 19th century dance, and “Brilliance,” which Krumhansl described as a “virtuoso display of intense feeling.”

Each topic evoked different emotional responses from the listeners in Krumhansl’s study. She presented some of her findings with help from the Ithaca College faculty in the string quartet, which included Simkin, Susan Waterbury (violin) and Rebecca Ansel (violin), assistant professors of music performance, and Debra Moree (viola), associate professor of music performance.

Of the seven musical topics described by Krumhansl, the presentation focused on three, with Moree, Ansel and Waterbury each describing an aspect of her performance in relation to one of the topics. They addressed the piece’s harmonic tension, the repetition of a motif or “musical signature,” the complexity of the second violin part and the importance of timing in conveying musical meaning.

Krumhansl hypothesized that, based on her subjects’ responses, the overall melancholy of the piece would cause listeners to experience slower heartbeat, slower breathing rate and lower body temperature. Mona Lisa smiles at mathematics

Later that afternoon, the Statler Auditorium filled with an audience anxious to hear Bulent Atalay expound on his book, “Math and the Mona Lisa,” which addresses the links between mathematics and art. Over the course of an hour, Atalay integrated the discoveries of Leonardo Fibonacci, the genius of Leonardo Da Vinci and the natural order of the universe.

Fibonacci was a 12th century mathematician whose credits include our base ten counting system, calculus and an equation that yields a series of numbers known as the “Fibonacci sequence.” Atalay explained that when the Fibonacci sequence is graphed, it creates a spiral, known as the “golden spiral.”

Ubiquitous in nature, the spiral appears in the center of sunflowers and the shape of galaxies.

“What Fibonacci didn’t realize was that these numbers are the numbers of nature,” he said.

Da Vinci recognized the vast implications of the golden spiral and, as Atalay demonstrated, incorporated it into his most celebrated works. Atalay detailed Da Vinci’s work in front of 22- foot projections of Da Vinci’s masterpieces and other canonized images. When Atalay superimposed the golden spiral onto the projections, it corresponded with the focal points of each painting.

Sophomore Travis Knapp devoted himself to seeing as many Light in Winter festival events as he could. Knapp found Atalay’s presentation enlightening.

“The way he spoke was enthralling,” Knapp said. “You were engaged the whole time.”

Atalay delivered concepts that involved advanced mathematics in such a way that anyone could become engaged and understand. After hearing Atalay’s lecture, Yifei Huang, an eighth grader from DeWitt Middle School, vowed that she would read Atalay’s book. “It was about seeing through what we see every day,” she said. Staff writers Chris Cummings and Jamie Saine, and contributing writers Emily McNeill and Lisa Reider contributed to this article.