"What Does Empty Space Look Like?"

presented by

Kiumars Kaveh, Eugenia Soprounova and Ivan Soprounov
(Mathematics, University of Toronto)

Wednesday, May 2, 2001
6:00 - 9:00 p. m.
at
The Fields Institute

An intuitive approach to geometry and topology of manifolds…

Imagine a two dimensional ant living on the surface of a big ball so that she has no idea of the surrounding three-dimensional space. As she is small, she may think that her world looks like flat infinite piece of paper. She would also have no perception of the curvature of her world. Though, if the ant has enough facilities and patience to paint the ball, she would realize that she is living in a bounded world since she can finish painting in a finite amount of time and using a finite amount of paint.

Well, in the eyes of four-dimensional creatures, we may be in a similar situation as the little ant...

Here is a the worksheet we worked from:

Here are some solutions:

The door prize was: "Introduction to Geometry" by Prof. H.M.S. Coxeter went to Vlad Gerchikov. Congratulations!

Printable flyer (in pdf format)