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G4G's Virtual Celebration of Mind | July 2023
Event Details
From Bourbaki to “Look-and-See”
A push by a handful of influential mathematicians in the 1930s almost completely eliminated any geometric intuition from mathematics. Fortunately, that goal didn’t succeed, and, in the 1970s, various outlets began regularly publishing short articles entitled “proofs without words.” In the past two decades, I have come to have a deep appreciation for these visual proofs and their role in mathematical understanding. We’ll explore some of my favorite proofs without words—ones that I think should be encountered by every math enthusiast—and make sense of them by adding a few words and seeing the classic visualizations in animated form.
Tom Edgar is a professor of mathematics and the current editor of Math Horizons, the undergraduate-level periodical from the Mathematical Association of America. He enjoys exploring recreational math ideas, writing expository articles, creating visual representations of mathematics, and working with undergraduates on research in combinatorial number theory. When not teaching, doing math, or working on the magazine, he spends his time animating mathematical ideas on YouTube as @MathVisualProofs or hanging out with his wife and son in the Pacific Northwest (often playing all the sports).