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Though his studio is not open to the public, Schultheis's work can be seen around the Puget Sound area. One piece hangs on the second floor of the Westin hotel in downtown Bellevue. He also has paintings at the Seattle Athletic Club, the Tacoma Art Museum, the University of Washington Medical Center, and at the Winston Wächter Fine Art gallery in Seattle.

“You can see that’s it’s all related,” he says. “Math has ties to art, music, dance. Everyone talks about left brain/right brain like we’ve all had a lobotomy.” But math is music. A graph is art. “Einstein played the violin. Paul Klee was an insurance salesman,” he says. “There is a wonderful embracing of it all.”

Schultheis left his day job a few years ago and started drawing on what he knew: the blackboard and the dry eraseboard. His early works were grey, white, and black. They had equations, and windows, and movement. A Seattle gallery started showing his work, and he was selling paintings and gaining positive reviews.

In 2005, he was commissioned to create a show for the National Academies—science, engineering, and medicine. He added yet more dimensions to his work, following his curiosity into history and color palettes.

"Einstein played the violin. Paul Klee was an insurance salesman."

Inspired by the Academies’ auditorium, which has an acoustical ceiling composed of cycloid-shaped curves, he created a series of paintings based on the cycloid, its physical shape and its mathematical formula. He also researched the history of the cycloid, noting that Galileo was working on the equation in the late 1500s, at the same time a Ming Dynasty military general named Qi Jiguang was inventing a weapon, a wheel that emitted sparks in the same form as a cycloid. The palette in Qi Jiguang’s official portrait was the inspiration for the colors Michael used in the cycloid series.

The Academies exhibit opened with a black-tie reception and brought international attention in the often very separate worlds of arts and sciences. Schultheis was overwhelmed by the response. “These were all Nobel Laureates, and they were interested in my paintings,” he says.

While his work has an appeal for many, those who understand the equations can look at the letters and numbers and see the graphic visualization of those ideas. “It’s like reading sheet music,” he says. “Some people can look at it and hear the notes. People who know math can look at my paintings and see the shapes.”

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