Maths at the British Museum
The Bank Holiday was a great chance to get out and remember why it's so good to live in London. The two highlights for me were a visit to Foyles Bookshop on the Charing Cross Road and a trip to the British Museum.
Every time I visit the British Museum I am reminded that the roof of the Great Court is one of the best visualisations of maths I've ever seen. Imagine, if you will, a huge box that stretches up from the ground to many hundreds of feet into space, well beyond the roof of the Great Court. Then what that magnificent roof does is pick out a wonderful, wonderful surface in that vast 3-dimensional space.
There's no better physical manifestation of a manifold, of topology, or of what is simply a solution to an elegant equation than that roof.
Filed in Art & Design, Personal and tagged architecture, britishmuseum, london, maths, personal
1 Comment
I am not a maths junky, but I do absolutely love the roof of the British Museum. A few years ago we went up the centrepoint tower and the view of the roof from above was amazing - but the funny thing is, you dont often see it pictured from above so I didnt realise straight away what it was! - undulating and beautiful.
at 2010-04-13T17:10:33+00:00