Thursday, March 21, 2024
– Live Presentation with Doris Schattschneider–
Session at 12 Noon Atlanta time
(check your time here)
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For published CoM presentations please visit the G4G YouTube channel
After this virtual CoM presentation on Zoom, we will meet for an informal social session in a different Zoom space where we can all see each other (see the blue button below). That Zoom meeting will start around 1pm ET.
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Marjorie Rice’s pursuit of convex pentagon tilersIt is amazing how intense curiosity and ingenuity can propel a person with little or no higher mathematical background to investigate mathematical problems and make surprising discoveries. Beginning in her middle age, American homemaker Marjorie Rice (1923 – 2017), having no math background beyond a high school general math course, pursued for years a self-assigned task of finding all types of convex pentagons that can tile the plane. She also fashioned beautiful tessellations undergirded by her pentagonal grids.
Doris Schattschneider, holds a Ph. D. in mathematics from Yale University and is Professor Emerita of Mathematics at Moravian University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where she taught for 34 years. She is known for her work in discrete geometry and tilings. She has written and lectured extensively about the work of the Dutch artist M.C. Escher, and also the amateur mathematician Marjorie Rice,serving as her “Boswell.” She is author of the book M.C. Escher: Visions of Symmetry and article “The Mathematical Side of M.C. Escher” (Notices of the American Mathematical Society) that document how Escher used mathematics, represented abstract mathematical ideas, and performed mathematical investigations. Currently an associate editor of the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, she also serves on the advisory committee of the National Museum of Mathematics in Manhattan, NY. She is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and has been active in the Mathematics Association of America (MAA) at all levels, serving as editor of Mathematics Magazine 1981–1985. In 1993 she received the national MAA Award for Distinguished Teaching of College or University Mathematics.