This year’s 3-day Telluride Association Winter Program expanded our academic horizons toward a whole new dimension: that of hyperbolic space.
Hyperbolic planes make for beautiful hats…
…..scarves…..
….or um, shoulder thingies…
Yet, what professor Daina Taimina showed us through such seemingly innocent figures was actually a philosophical revolution.
Euclid’s laws of geometry – for centuries taken as absolute truths — claim that if you draw a straight line crossing another straight line diagonally, it will necessarily also cross any parallel lines. Indeed, how could it be otherwise?
Until we drew such lines on crocheted hyperbolic planes ourselves, none of us could really imagine how it could be otherwise. But then, there it was: the refutation of Euclidian truth, the tangible experience of hyperbolic space…
Posted under Events
This post was written by LuisaS on February 8, 2010