A Mathematical Trip to Princeton

Abstract

Please send all submissions to Mathematical Tourist Editor, Dirk Huylebrouck, Aartshertogstraat 42, 8400 Oostende, Belgium e-mail: dirk.huylebrouck@gmail.com T he phone rings and a familiar voice speaks. ‘‘Since you’re going to Princeton this summer, you’ll surely be taking a tour of the Princeton campus, and their math department. When you go there, be sure to take note of a sculpture near the Math Department Commons Room. This piece involves three mathematicians: One was the artist, another commissioned the piece, and the third was the one to whom it was dedicated. When you get back, tell me what you ... what? No time? I’m sorry, you make the time.’’ Orders are orders, so you make the time and tour the beautiful Princeton University Campus. There, you find that sculpture, along with an ivory tower and many other sights worth seeing. The Princeton University mathematics department may or may not be in first place in the mythical USA Mathematics Marathon, but it is certainly up there in the lead pack. Two Fine Halls have housed the Princeton math department, both named for Henry Burchard Fine (1858–1928), the first chair of mathematics at Princeton and President of the American Mathematical Society in 1911–1912. The first building was opened in 1930; it was renamed Jones Hall in 1968 when the second and current Fine Hall was built. In the immediate vicinity of the current Fine Hall are one building and two sculptures worth a second look. The building is the Lewis Science Library [4], which opened in 2008. Designed by architect Frank O. Gehry, it is a mathematical marvel in its own right. (Go inside and look around: It’s time well spent.) Viewed from the Fine Hall tower, it resembles a cell complex (Figure 1). The library is one among many architectural gems at Princeton, as an architect friend from high-school and his historian wife demonstrated during a campus tour. The library stands next to Fine Hall on what was formerly the site of an informal volleyball court used by the math faculty and students. Apparently, when Fields Medalist William Thurston was on the faculty, he supplied the net, which he put up in the morning and took down in the evening. Two steel sculptures of mathematical character stand in the vicinity. The older one is Alexander Calder’s 26-foot sculpture ‘‘Five Disks: One Empty;’’ [3] dedicated in 1971, it stands in the Fine Hall courtyard plaza between the mathematics and physics departments. (Maybe it looks like a horse, and maybe it doesn’t–Modern Art is like that.) The newer one is Richard Serra’s ‘‘The Hedgehog and the Fox,’’ [5] a trio of 90-foot long and 15-foot high nested serpentine steel ribbons standing just east of the library. It’s fun to walk through this huge installation and listen to the echoes. Appropriately, when viewed from the Fine Hall tower, ‘‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’’ looks like a triple integral sign (Figure 2).