Colloquium Posters

At the start of Fall quarter 2002, Persi Diaconis asked me to make a poster for the first of a series of talks in the math department here at Stanford. I got the job to do a poster for each one throughout the year. The process involved finding whoever was giving the talk and getting some sort of image to use, either from them directly or getting the idea for some sort of image that I can make or get from somewhere else. Some sort of relevance to the subject of the talk occasionally happened too...

Since then I have collected the occasional mathematical poster here. Chronological order is left to right and bottom to top. Beware that some of the images are rather big.

Tricky one this, with no obvious relevant pictures, and even just a pun on the words is hard...'Index' isn't a very visual concept any way I could think of. The subject does have a bunch of concisely stated and closely related theorems though. Many results come out of the core index theorems, hence the whirlpool/big bang idea. The 'shadows' are formed when light passes through a plane of gravitational attractors, gets distorted and forms into cusps and so on in the image. Ravi Vakil asked me to do the cover for the second edition of his book of the above title, published in October 2007. There are many many features in the pictured pinecone and the arrows background coming from my discussions with Ravi, and which one should really buy the book to appreciate! The pinecone was prototyped in Second Life and rendered in Rhinocerous with the assistance of Bathsheba Grossman. The background was generated using a Python script.

Ralph Cohen asked me to do this poster for a workshop he is helping to organise at Stony Brook. The diagrams illustrate the construction of a 'fat graph', a technique often used in the subject. The main diagram also bears a passing resemblance to the Stony Brook logo. A black and white image because the poster was to be photocopied. I used The Celtic Knot Font for the border. Incidentally, Celtic knots are usually alternating knots (as this one is (unless its a link, I have never checked)). Brainstorming with Susan Holmes resulted in this, incorporating a random walk, coin tossing, cards (as in "Alice in Wonderland"), Persi's business card from when he was a magician, and an ambigram by Scott Kim. I used my graphics tablet to draw many pairs of legs, but there is plenty of cheating going on too.

This is one of the few made from scratch, without using images from elsewhere. In the bottom right is a cobordism, and the main image is representative of the Thom Pontryagin construction. The umbrella is a reference to a scene in the film "A Beautiful Mind", in which John Nash picks out the image of an umbrella among the stars. The subject matter doesn't really lend itself to good images (way too many dimensions), so I went for a different sort of interpretation of the title.

The elliptic curve picture shows an order 6 element in the group on the curve. The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture is one of the problems worth a $1,000,000 prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute. The image is of a page of the Archimedes palimpsest. The photograph was taken under UV light then digitally enhanced so the writings can be seen clearly. The other set of writings are a religious text, written over the Archimedes text when recycling was even more important than today. The Mandelbrot set of course.

Yasha Eliashberg asked me to do this poster for a series of talks given by Prof. Dubrovin, who is/was visiting from Italy/Russia. We didn't have an image until Dubrovin supplied the equations and idea for the picture. The photo I found on the internet - it was taken by Philip Guo at MIT and illustrates one of the phenomena very nicely. It's also a nice picture of a duck. I'm pleased with the distortion on the words to go with the ripples. To the left is Gauss, to the right is Stein, who is in the statistics department here at Stanford. Stein came up with an estimate that is better than the one Gauss invented.

This comes from the Geometry Center at the University of Minnesota. It's a snapshot from the video 'Not Knot', this part of the video by Charlie Gunn. Tai-Ping supplied the cartoon, which has something to do with shockwaves. I coloured it a little, trying to keep with the style and added the text. Zelmanov was the first visiting speaker, and partly as a result, I didn't have the title until late on, and no image either. The picture does have something to do with infinite groups, but otherwise didn't have much to do with the talk.

The image is from a painting in Rafe's office, by Eugenie Hunsicker. Not much direct relevance to the talk, but lots of geometry references... I did the tesselation from scratch, which apparently has something to do with the subject matter. The bulge somehow fits nicely with it being about rigidity. Original is from a paper of Eliashberg and Thurston, and depicts lines in a vector field killed by the form dz - ydx. I added the colours and the text copying the 'propellers'.

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Tricky one this, with no obvious relevant pictures, and even just a pun on the words is hard...'Index' isn't a very visual concept any way I could think of. The subject does have a bunch of concisely stated and closely related theorems though. Many results come out of the core index theorems, hence the whirlpool/big bang idea.	The 'shadows' are formed when light passes through a plane of gravitational attractors, gets distorted and forms into cusps and so on in the image.	Ravi Vakil asked me to do the cover for the second edition of his book of the above title, published in October 2007. There are many many features in the pictured pinecone and the arrows background coming from my discussions with Ravi, and which one should really buy the book to appreciate! The pinecone was prototyped in Second Life and rendered in Rhinocerous with the assistance of Bathsheba Grossman. The background was generated using a Python script.


Ralph Cohen asked me to do this poster for a workshop he is helping to organise at Stony Brook. The diagrams illustrate the construction of a 'fat graph', a technique often used in the subject. The main diagram also bears a passing resemblance to the Stony Brook logo.	A black and white image because the poster was to be photocopied. I used The Celtic Knot Font for the border. Incidentally, Celtic knots are usually alternating knots (as this one is (unless its a link, I have never checked)).	Brainstorming with Susan Holmes resulted in this, incorporating a random walk, coin tossing, cards (as in "Alice in Wonderland"), Persi's business card from when he was a magician, and an ambigram by Scott Kim. I used my graphics tablet to draw many pairs of legs, but there is plenty of cheating going on too.


This is one of the few made from scratch, without using images from elsewhere. In the bottom right is a cobordism, and the main image is representative of the Thom Pontryagin construction.	The umbrella is a reference to a scene in the film "A Beautiful Mind", in which John Nash picks out the image of an umbrella among the stars.	The subject matter doesn't really lend itself to good images (way too many dimensions), so I went for a different sort of interpretation of the title.


The elliptic curve picture shows an order 6 element in the group on the curve. The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture is one of the problems worth a $1,000,000 prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute.	The image is of a page of the Archimedes palimpsest. The photograph was taken under UV light then digitally enhanced so the writings can be seen clearly. The other set of writings are a religious text, written over the Archimedes text when recycling was even more important than today.	The Mandelbrot set of course.


Yasha Eliashberg asked me to do this poster for a series of talks given by Prof. Dubrovin, who is/was visiting from Italy/Russia. We didn't have an image until Dubrovin supplied the equations and idea for the picture.	The photo I found on the internet - it was taken by Philip Guo at MIT and illustrates one of the phenomena very nicely. It's also a nice picture of a duck. I'm pleased with the distortion on the words to go with the ripples.	To the left is Gauss, to the right is Stein, who is in the statistics department here at Stanford. Stein came up with an estimate that is better than the one Gauss invented.


This comes from the Geometry Center at the University of Minnesota. It's a snapshot from the video 'Not Knot', this part of the video by Charlie Gunn.	Tai-Ping supplied the cartoon, which has something to do with shockwaves. I coloured it a little, trying to keep with the style and added the text.	Zelmanov was the first visiting speaker, and partly as a result, I didn't have the title until late on, and no image either. The picture does have something to do with infinite groups, but otherwise didn't have much to do with the talk.


The image is from a painting in Rafe's office, by Eugenie Hunsicker. Not much direct relevance to the talk, but lots of geometry references...	I did the tesselation from scratch, which apparently has something to do with the subject matter. The bulge somehow fits nicely with it being about rigidity.	Original is from a paper of Eliashberg and Thurston, and depicts lines in a vector field killed by the form dz - ydx. I added the colours and the text copying the 'propellers'.

Last updated:23 August 2007