The Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation invites you to visit the exhibition “Mathematics of Planet Earth” at Karlstorbahnhof in Heidelberg, Germany! It runs from July 5 to Aug 2, 2015, for the first time in Heidelberg. It offers a big variety of exciting adventures for children and adults alike.
Jos Leys, Étienne Ghys and Aurélien Alvarez
The following pictures are images from two chapters of the film “Dimensions, a walk through mathematics” rendered in high-resolution. In one chapter, Hipparchus shows us how to describe the position of any point on Earth with two numbers and explains the stereographic projection. In another chapter, mathematician Ludwig Schläfli talks about objects that live in the fourth dimension, and shows a parade of four-dimensional polytopes, strange objects with 24, 120 and even 600 faces! Two pictures of the exhibition that look like knots are special.
The Hecatonicosachoron
Also called the “120-cell”, this is a regular polytope in four dimensions. It is the four dimensional analogue of the three dimensional dodecahedron, that has 12 pentagonal faces, 20 vertices and 30 edges.
The hecatonicosachoron has 120 ‘faces’, but they are in 4 di- mensions, so they are in reality three-dimensional faces: they are all dodecahedrons! The two-dimensional faces of these dodeca- hedrons are of course pentagons, and there are 720 of them. There are 600 vertices and 1200 edges.