New Sculpture Looks Beyond Three Dimensions
Artistic works traditionally carry significance
beyond their physical beauty, but a new sculpture in the McAllister Building
headquarters of the Penn State Department of Mathematics may carry that
tradition to its limits. The stainless-steel work, a striking object of visual
art, also is a mental portal to the fourth dimension, a teaching tool, a
memorial to a graduate of the math department, and a reminder of the terrorist
attacks of 11 September 2001.
The Penn State Department of Mathematics will host an open house of its extensively renovated McAllister Building, featuring a dedication ceremony for a unique sculpture with deep mathematical significance on 21 October 2005 at the Penn State University Park campus.....No good rendering of any 4-dimensional object existed anywhere in the world before the Octacube, either in solid or virtual form, according to Adrian Ocneanu, the Penn State professor of mathematics who designed the sculpture.
The sculpture....presents a three-dimensional "shadow" of a four-dimensional solid object. There is a link at the press release page to a detailed description of the whole representation.
The sculpture is a gift from Jill Grashof Anderson, a mathematics alumna of Penn State as a memorial for her husband, Kermit C. Anderson, also a Penn State mathematics graduate, who was killed in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City on 11 September 2001. The dedication ceremony for the sculpture will include an explanation of its mathematical meaning by its designer, Adrian Ocneanu, professor of mathematics. The stainless-steel Octacube is a striking object of visual art and also a mental portal to the fourth dimension, a teaching tool, and a research object bringing together many branches of mathematics and physics connected to the structure of symmetry.
There is a striking animation of the sculpture here.
Posted: Thu - October 20, 2005 at 03:37 PM