When:
Friday, May 11, 2018
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM CT
Where: Technological Institute, L211, 2145 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 map it
Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students
Contact:
Yassaman
(847) 491-7650
Group: Physics and Astronomy Colloquia
Category: Academic
Title: Non-euclidean virtual reality
Speaker: Elisabetta Matsumoto, Georgia Institute of Technology
Abstract: The properties of euclidean space seem natural and obvious to us, to the point that it took mathematicians over two thousand years to see an alternative to Euclid’s parallel postulate. The eventual discovery of hyperbolic geometry in the 19th century shook our assumptions, revealing just how strongly our native experience of the world blinded us from consistent alternatives, even in a field that many see as purely theoretical. Non-euclidean spaces are still seen as unintuitive and exotic, but with direct immersive experiences we can get a better intuitive feel for them. The latest wave of virtual reality hardware, in particular the HTC Vive, tracks both the orientation and the position of the headset within a room-sized volume, allowing for such an experience. We use this nacent technology to explore the three-dimensional geometries of the Thurston/Perelman geometrization theorem. This talk focuses on our simulations of H³ and H²×E.
Host: Driscoll
Speaker Schedule
Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, colloquium