Bun & Bolt ● 01–05
Made from curiosity, meant to be explored.
Bun & Bolt is an independent studio of two, making interactive works for the web: explorable mathematics, physical simulations, and interactive stories. Everything runs in your browser, on a phone or a computer. It’s free to use, with no ads and no account needed.
Bun is a PhD student in the philosophy of technology. Bolt spent years as a startup founder. What we share is a habit of following our curiosity: a mathematical idea we want to see in motion, the way sand settles after a hand passes through it, a question hidden in a set of numbers. When something catches us, we turn it into a piece you can explore for yourself, and now and then into a research paper.
We approach each piece more like a small artwork than a product: we take our time with how it looks and feels, and stay with it until it seems right. What becomes of it after that, we leave to the people who find it.
Find a place to start
- 01
Bun & Bolt Math
A visual dictionary of mathematics
One concept per page, each drawn live so you can change it and watch it respond. It covers algebra, geometry, calculus, linear algebra, probability and statistics, chaos, fractals, and number theory, from the derivative and eigenvectors to Bayes’ theorem, the Möbius strip, the Game of Life, and the Mandelbrot set.
Every page opens straight onto an interactive picture, with controls modeled on a precision instrument and a short explanation of what you’re seeing. It’s made for anyone who has met an idea before and wants to see how it actually behaves; links keep your exact settings, and a presentation mode puts a page on a classroom projector. The code behind the calculations is public, along with its tests.
- 02
Kinetic Sand Table
Leave a mark. Watch it slowly fade.
A tray of sand in your browser, in the spirit of a Japanese dry garden. Draw with a stick, comb with a rake, dig and pour with a scoop or shovel, or set a sand pendulum swinging. Then a slow arm turns through the tray and pushes the sand back until your marks are gone.
Getting sand to behave like sand took seven versions. The sand you dig out is the sand you pour back, slopes slump once they pass the angle of repose, and the sound follows the speed of your hand. You can record a short clip to share.
- 03
Conway’s Game of Life
Seven challenges, one simple rule.
Conway’s Game of Life, turned into a set of challenges. Start from at most 36 cells and try to last the longest before dying out, burst into the biggest firework, build the clock with the longest period, or spread across the most ground. There are seven leaderboards in all, and every entry is run and judged by the same engine.
In 3D, each generation is stacked on the last, so a pattern’s whole history stands as a sculpture. We also study Life as mathematics: our paper The Ultimate Fate of Life Is Not Shared answers an open question, posed in 2022, about its long-run behavior.
- 04
Pool
We’re still building this island.
A little 3D island on steel legs out at sea, with glass pools, a slide, and a flat-roofed house. Pick someone up and throw them in, and the judges score the dive. Or draw a shape on the water, a circle, a star, a heart, and the swimmers take their places for synchronized swimming.
The island began after we watched Rose Island, the film about the platform an Italian engineer built in the Adriatic and, in 1968, declared a country of its own.
- 05
World Cup 2026, remembered
Where Bun & Bolt began.
A playful data story from the 2026 World Cup: three players whose market values differ by a factor of four thousand, put on the same scale. Every figure is sourced, and the numbers stay as they were in July 2026.
It was Bun’s first World Cup, and her favorite team was Cape Verde: neither finalist could beat them in ninety minutes. Bun made this page in a day, the weekend of the final: our first try at turning something we lived through into a small product, and the first page on Bun & Bolt.