SCULPTORS have a sense of mathematical beauty – even if they don’t realise it. So says mathematician Matthias Weber at Indiana University in Bloomington.
Weber is an expert on minimal surfaces, the shapes that surfaces adopt to minimise surface tension. An example is the film that forms on a bent coat hanger dipped into soapy water. At every point, the surface is either straight or saddle-shaped.
Time after time, Weber has been able to recreate the shapes of modern sculptures using minimal surface equations. “Artists sculpt near-minimal surfaces without realising it – I think they have a certain subjective concept of…
