2015 Bridges Conference Short Movie Festival
Saul Schleimer and Henry Segerman
Filmmakers
Statement
Saul Schleimer is a geometric topologist, working at the University of Warwick. His other interests include combinatorial group theory and computation. He is especially interested in the interplay between these fields and additionally in visualization of ideas from these fields. 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.
Films
We are geometric topologists, and we are interested in visualising knots, surfaces and three-manifolds. Prompted by this, we design 3D printed models of these objects. This movie shows and explains some of the relevant mathematics.
Seifert surfaces are spanning surfaces for knots, in a similar way to how soap films span wire loops. The Seifert surfaces for torus knots have a beautiful representation as the Milnor fibers of polynomial singularities.
We are geometric topologists, and we are interested in visualising knots, surfaces and three-manifolds. Prompted by this, we design 3D printed models of these objects. This movie shows and explains some of the relevant mathematics.
A mathematician's knot is a closed loop in space. A torus knot is a knot that can be drawn on the surface of a torus, i.e. a bagel. While both of our movies can be viewed independently, this movie on torus knots describes some background to the movie on Seifert surfaces.