Indra's Pearls: Geometry and Symmetry
Speaker(s):
Professor Caroline Series
Date/Time: 04/05/2010, 6pm
Venue: Museum of London
THE LONDON MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY, JOINTLY WITH GRESHAM COLLEGE
Felix Klein, one of the great nineteenth-century geometers, discovered in mathematics an idea prefigured in a Buddhist myth: the heaven of Indra contained a net of pearls, each of which was reflected in its neighbour, so that the whole Universe was mirrored in each pearl. Klein studied infinitely repeated reflections and was led in his imagination to remarkable forms with hitherto unknown symmetries.
In the 1980s a group of mathematicians embarked on the first computer exploration of Klein's vision, and in doing so found further extraordinary images of their own. Join one of the group, Caroline Series, on the path from basic mathematical ideas to simple algorithms whose repetition creates delicate fractal filigrees which are only now beginning to be explored fully.
Professor Caroline Series, University of Warwick
Other lectures held in collaboration with the London Mathematical Society include:
Undecidable and decidable
Problems by Professor Angus MacIntyre
Mathematics and
Smallpox by Professor Tom Körner
Cancer can give you
maths by Professor Philip Maini
Multiplying and Dividing
by Whole Numbers by Professor Timothy Gowers
Can maths catch criminals
and bring them to justice?
by Professor Christopher Budd
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