When most people think of shapes, they imagine a triangle, a rectangle, or maybe even a fancier-sounding rhombus or trapezoid. But to mathematicians, shapes encompass a vast universe of surprising ...

A mathematical problem solved by Susanna Heikkilä relates to the classification of quasiregularly elliptic 4-manifolds, ...

The central objects of study in topology are spaces called manifolds, which look flat when you zoom in on them. The surface of a sphere, for instance, is a two-dimensional manifold. Topologists ...

Mathematician Jeffrey Weeks led an introductory-level tutorial last night on a not-so-elementary concept: four-dimensional shapes. In the second talk of his three-part Norbert Wiener Lecture Series ...

The notion of dimension at first seems intuitive. Glancing out the window we might see a crow sitting atop a cramped flagpole experiencing zero dimensions, a robin on a telephone wire constrained to ...

Susanna Heikkilä uses a knitted chessboard pattern and crocheted balls to illustrate the idea of quasiregular mappings, or how the plane curves to cover the form. Susanna Heikkilä solved a problem in ...

A key question that remains in biology and biophysics is how three-dimensional tissue shapes emerge during animal development. Research teams have now found a mechanism by which tissues can be ...