Steve Trettel

Geometry from the Inside

Geometry is one of the oldest ongoing projects of humanity, with an unbroken chain of deep thought over the twenty-five centuries spanning Pythagoras to Einstein and continuing ever stronger into the future.  Over this time, mathematics has ventured beyond the 3-dimensional Euclidean world around us and into a menagerie of curved and twisted worlds.  These new geometries have greatly expanded our mathematical universe, and found applications from describing the curvature of space-time to the geometry of data in machine learning.

In this talk, we will attempt a broad exploration of modern geometry from the human perspective, starting from the question of ‘what would it be like to live in a curved world?’  Thinking deeply about what it means to ‘see’, we will use computer graphics to explore several of the modern geometric spaces integral to the Geometry+Dynamics Research Station at HITS/Heidelberg University.

CV