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First-Year Lecture: Roland van der Veen

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When?
September 7, 2020 3:00 PM
Where?
Online

What?

The space of Rotations: Mathematics with a twist

Roland van der Veen is regarded within the FMF as being one of the best mathematics lecturers of the University. He has spoken about the Unsolvability of the Quintic Equation at our symposium last year, and now he's back to give you a taste of higher mathematics. Here's the abstract he provided:

"What is a rotation in three dimensions, how many are there and how do they fit together? Since we are able to rotate ourselves and the objects around us in everyday life we should know some intuitive answers to these questions. The goal of this talk is to introduce a mathematical framework to talk about spatial rotations: the space of rotations. We will think of a motion as a sequence of rotations or rather a path through the space of rotations. This leads to the realization that essentially there are only two motions possible. Time permitting I will also mention how the study of rotations allows one to cut a ball into five pieces and use rotations to rearrange the pieces so as to obtain two exact copies of the original."

The lecture will start on monday the 7th of september around 15:00 and can be found here.

We hope to see you there!