Henry Segerman and Will Segerman
Artists
Henry Segerman
Associate Professor of Mathematics
Oklahoma State University
Stillwater, Oklahoma, USA
Statement
Henry Segerman is an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at Oklahoma State University. His mathematical research is in 3-dimensional geometry and topology, and concepts from those areas often appear in his work. Other artistic interests involve procedural generation, self reference, ambigrams and puzzles. Will Segerman is a self-employed sculptor in analogue and digital media. He works from his home/office/workshop in Brighton, UK. His current main source of income is as a virtual milliner.
Artworks
More fun than a hypercube of monkeys
22.6 cm x 20.8 cm x 21.4 cm
PA 2200 Plastic, Selective-Laser-Sintered
2014
This sculpture was inspired by a question of Vi Hart. As far as we know, this is the first sculpture (in fact, physical object) with the quaternion group as its symmetry group. The quaternion group {1,i,j,k,-1,-i,-j,-k} is not a subgroup of the symmetries of 3D space, but it is very naturally a subgroup of the symmetries of 4D space. The monkey was designed in a 3D cube, viewed as one of the eight cells of a hypercube. The quaternion group moves the monkey to the other seven cells. Radial projection moves the monkeys onto the 3-sphere, the unit sphere in 4D space, then stereographic projection moves the monkeys to 3D space. The distortion in the sizes of the monkeys comes only from this last step - otherwise all eight monkeys are identical.