View Proposal #31
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ID | 31 |
---|---|
First Name | Frank |
Last Name | Farris |
Institution | Santa Clara University and Editor of Mathematics Magazine |
Speaker Category | invited |
Title of Talk | Forbidden Symmetry: Relaxing the Crystallographic Restriction |
Abstract | If you look at enough swatches of wallpaper, you will see centers of 2-fold, 3-fold, 4-fold, and 6-fold rotation. Why not 5-fold centers? They cannot occur, according to the Crystallographic Restriction, a fundamental result about wallpaper patterns, which are defined to be invariant under two linearly independent translations. Even so, we offer convincing pictures that appear to show wallpapers with 5-fold symmetry. The talk is intended to be accessible to students who know something about level curves in the plane and linear algebra. |
Subject area(s) | Geometry |
Suitable for undergraduates? | Yes |
Day Preference | |
Computer Needed? | Y |
Bringing a laptop? | N |
Overhead Needed? | Y |
Software requests | |
Special Needs | |
Date Submitted | 2/18/2004 |
Year | 2004 |