Marjorie Senechal
Smith College
Title: It's a hat . . . it's a shirt . . . it's an einstein!
Time: Saturday, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Abstract: In March, 2023, a preprint was posted by David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss on arxiv.org that stunned the mathematical world and beyond. Twitter exploded, and even The New York Times joined in! Its three-word title, "An Aperiodic Monotile," announced a solution to a problem that some thought might not have one. In this talk we look at that problem and its solution (the so-called einstein) in its historical and mathematical contexts and consider some of the new questions raised by the paper's novel proofs.
Bio: Marjorie Senechal is Louise Wolff Kahn professor emerita in mathematics and history of science and technology at Smith College, past editor-in-chief of The MathematicalIntelligencer, and an inaugural fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Her research fields are mathematical crystallography and discrete geometry, and the history of both. Her books include Quasicrystals and Geometry, Shaping Space, and a biography, I Died for Beauty: Dorothy Wrinch and the Cultures of Science.