Graduate Student Seminar - Adam Artymowicz

Adam Artymowicz will show us impossible shapes.  

Abstract:

Some shapes can be drawn on a page, but cannot be realized in three-dimensional space (a famous example is M.C. Escher’s “impossible staircase”). I will describe a short article of Penrose, titled “On the Cohomology of Impossible Figures”, which describes how the failure of these shapes to exist in space can be measured using Čech cohomology. No knowledge of topology is assumed.

This seminar was made possible by funding from the McGill mathematics and statistics department, PGSS, and GSAMS.