American Mathematical Monthly
Franklin & Marshall College
Available through 2027

This Section Visitor is available to present on the following topics at Section meetings:

Double Take: Geometry, Perspective, and Optical Illusions
Perspective geometry, so it's said, was the art that made paintings seem realistic and true to life. Yet the same artistic techniques---and by extension, the same geometry---can create images that astound and confound us. We explore the geometry behind a carnival of such illusions, from images that seem to change shape as we move, to the impossible worlds of Escher and del Prete.

Drawing Conclusions from Drawing a Square
The Renaissance famously brought us amazingly realistic perspective art. Creating that art was the spark from which projective geometry caught fire and grew. This talk looks directly at projective geometry as a tool to illuminate the way we see the world around us, whether we look with our eyes, with our cameras, or with the computer (via our favorite animated movies). One of the surprising results of projective geometry is that it implies that every quadrangle (whether convex or not) is the perspective image of a square. We will describe implications of this result for computer vision, for photogrammetry, for applications of piece-wise planar cones, and of course for perspective art and projective geometry.

For more information about the Section Visitor program, please visit the Section Visitor webpage.