Natural tilings: from hard rock to soft cells - Gábor Domokos

Gábor Domokos will use the geometric theory of tilings to describe natural patterns ranging from nanoscale to planetary scale, appearing in physics, biology, and geology.

Rock fragments can be modelled by polyhedra having, on average, six flat faces and eight sharp vertices. If we depart from polyhedra and admit curved faces then we can tile space without any sharp corners with a new class of shapes, called soft cells, which appear in both living and non-living nature. Mathematics is learning from nature.

Gábor Domokos is a research professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He is best known for proving a conjecture of V.I. Arnold by constructing, with Péter Várkonyi, the Gömböc, the first homogeneous, convex shape with just one stable and one unstable static equilibrium.

Please email [email protected] to register to attend in person.

The lecture will later be broadcast on the Oxford Mathematics YouTube Channel on Thursday 22 May at 5pm, and will then be available to watch any time after (no need to register for the online version).

The Oxford Mathematics Public Lectures are generously supported by XTX Markets.