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New Zealand Mathematics Colloquium 1999
July 6-9, 1999
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Canterbury
Christchurch, New Zealand

Organizers
Doris Barnard, Therese Boustead, Chris Price, Bruce Robson, Gunter Steinke, Graeme Wake, Allan Willms

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Pretty Pictures of Geometries - Selling Real Estate in Finite Geometries
by
Burkard Polster
Department of Pure Mathematics / The University of Adelaide

How do you convey to your students, colleagues and friends some of the beauty of the kind of mathematics you are obsessed with? Whenever I am faced with this question, I start by showing my `victims' some of the pictures and models I have collected and constructed over the years. In this talk I will concentrate on my favorite models of the smallest projective space and some closely related geometries such as the Fano plane, the Desargues configuration, spreads, ovoids, packings, and hyperpackings. These models capture much of the abstract beauty, construction principles, special features, and interconnections of the geometries. The presentation of stereograms and ray-traced images of the spatial models are some of the highlights of this talk.

burkard's homepage

Date received: February 14, 1999

Copyright © 1999 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # cacc-08.