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 |