Contact information
Name:
C. Jayne Trent
Phone:
6103305267
Email:
trentj@lafayette.edu
Categories:
When:
Thursday, November 16, 2023 - 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Where:
Pardee 218
Presenter:
Allison N. Miller (Swarthmore College)
Price:
free and there will be pizza!
Abstract: Given a closed curve in the plane, must there be four points on the curve that are the vertices of a square? This question, first asked by Otto Toeplitz more than 100 years ago, is still open and the subject of active research. Somewhat surprisingly, the path to a solution seems to run through understanding strange surfaces like the Mobius band and the Klein bottle. In this talk, we'll discuss several variants of Toeplitz's problem and will use the topology of nonorientable surfaces to prove that every closed curve in the plane contains an inscribed rectangle. We will finish with an introduction to visualizing surfaces in 4-dimensional space.
Sponsored by:
Department of Mathematics