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).