UA News

Salvador Dali, throughout his long career, was fascinated by images and concepts from science and mathematics, and he incorporated many of them into his paintings. The central object in his 1954 painting "Corpus Hypercubicus" is a Christ figure on an unfolded hypercube from the fourth dimension. That painting put geometer Tom Banchoff of Brown University in contact with the artist, leading to a dozen meetings  over the period of 1975-1985. In this talk, Professor Banchoff will give a personal report on insights into why Dali chose the mathematical ideas he included in his work, and how he went about constructing and carrying out his paintings. Topics include exaggerated perspective, pattern recognition and catastrophe theory. The presentation will feature computer generated images and animations, as well as excepts from the documentary "The Dali Dimension."

The Daniel Bartlett Memorial Lecture recognizes a great scholar whose life ended much too soon. Bartlett was a Presidential and National Merit Scholar from University High School and and accomplished math scholar and musician.  He was in his fourth year of graduate school in mathematics when he died tragically from cardiac arrest in 2006.