Colloquium Mathematics - Prof. dr. Jaap Top, University of Groningen

Title:Lines between Math and Art

Abstract:

This is a talk intended for a very general audience, already presented in Leiden on June 2nd. It pays attention to a particular interest of Bas Edixhoven (1962-2022), namely Mathematics with connections to Art.

The talk is described as follows:

Starting with a lecture entitled "Some elliptic curves from the real world" in 2014 during the annual Dutch Mathematical Congress, Bas Edixhoven presented several talks discussing the "torqued ellipses" made by the American sculptor Richard Serra. This resulted in a place for Bas among the artists with artworks on display in the Virtual Museum Tesseract.

The present talk aims to recall and explain these contributions by Bas, and place it in a more general framework of inspirations from math to art and, as in this case, vice versa. In particular, it should become clear what the mentioned works of art have to do with the title of the 2014 lecture by Bas.