Curtis McMullen’s Negatively Curved Crystals

From Harvard Magazine:
In Norman Juster’s children’s book The Phantom Tollbooth, the land of infinity can be reached by following a line drawn on the ground for all eternity, then taking a left at the end. Fortunately, for viewers in a hurry, an exhibition now on display on the first floor of the Science Center offers a shortcut. Cabot professor of mathematics, Curtis McMullen, chair of the department, has created a series of nine prints, Negatively Curved Crystals, in part to illustrate how research mathematics sees the infinite. For mathematicians, McMullen’s images are themselves discoveries—as much a part of the research process as the proof of a new theorem. For everyone else, these prints are beautiful works of art, interwoven tapestries of lines and curves that build slowly into shadowy geometric forms, some only visible at a distance. Each image is the trace of an infinite process, left behind for us finite beings to admire…
Read More…