Interview with Jon-Paul Wheatley

An Art Department interview in MAA Focus with Jon-Paul Wheatley, who designs leather soccer balls by hand — starting from a terrible first attempt at 12 pentagons during lockdown and learning sphere geometry entirely through iteration. The conversation covers how flat panels must encode curvature to form a true sphere, the making of the “impossaball” with Matt Parker (a ball that appears hexagon-only from two specific angles), and the case for hands-on making as a route into geometric intuition.