2:00 pm Thursday, July 1, 2010
Student Geometry Seminar: An elliptic curve, tessellations and M.C. Escher
by Arunima Ray (Rice University - Mathematics Department) in HB 423
We'll talk about some of the mathematics in M.C. Escher's artwork. Escher's 1956 lithograph titled Print Gallery shows a young man standing in an exhibition gallery - the picture he is looking at contains the gallery he's in at that very moment! A white patch in the middle of the lithograph contains Escher's monogram and signature. We will talk about how B. de Smit and H.W. Lenstra Jr. discovered that the lithograph can be viewed as drawn on an elliptic curve over the complex numbers and filled in the circular patch. We'll go on to talk a teensy bit about tessellations of the conformal disk model for hyperbolic geometry in the context of Escher's Circle Limit prints. I promise to include as many fun Escher pictures as possible. Host Department: Rice University-Mathematics
Submitted by mathweb@rice.edu |
