Monsters and Quasicrystals · quasicrystals were discovered in the 1980s, some scientists (and the...
Transcript of Monsters and Quasicrystals · quasicrystals were discovered in the 1980s, some scientists (and the...
Centre for Computational and Discrete Geometry
Department of Mathematics & Statistics University of Calgary
The Fall 2014 Fejes Tóth Lecture will be delivered by Professor Marjorie Senechal of Smith College, Northampton, MA.
Summary:
Regular pentagons don't tile the plane, as Kepler discovered when he tried. The gaps didn't bother him but overlaps did; calling them monsters, he quit. 350 years later Penrose took another look and found his famous aperiodic tiles. When quasicrystals were discovered in the 1980s, some scientists (and the public) assumed that Penrose tilings would be the model for their structure. That was a good first guess, but it turned out to be wrong: real quasicrystals aren't tilings, they're (very handsome) monsters! And they pose challenging problems in discrete geometry.
Fejes Tóth Lecture – Fall 2014
Monsters and Quasicrystals
Speaker: Prof. Marjorie Senechal Friday October 17, 2014 (2:00pm), MS 211
About the speaker:
Marjorie Senechal is the Louise Wolff Kahn Professor Emerita in Mathematics and History of Science and Technology at Smith College, Northampton, MA, and editor-in-chief of The Mathematical Intelligencer. She grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, and received a B.S. from the University of Chicago and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Illinois Institute of Technology, all in mathematics. Her research interests are discrete geometry (in particular
mathematical crystallography) and the history of mathematics and science. Her books include Quasicrystals and Geometry (CUP), I Died for Beauty: Dorothy Wrinch and the Cultures of Science (OUP), and Shaping Space: Exploring Polyhedra in Nature, Art, and the Geometrical Imagination) (Springer).