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Cliff Reiter, professor of mathematics, will present the talk “Apollonian Circle Packings” noon-1 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 1 in Pardee Hall room 201.
The talk is part of the math department’s Mathematical Adventures And Diversions (MAAD) series. No mathematical background is assumed for MAAD presentations. A free lunch will be provided.
Apollonian packings are constructed through the use of the Descartes Circle Theorem and a geometric method known as circle inversion. A Descartes configuration is a basic structure of four circles where each circle is tangent to the other three. These circles are then inverted to make another, related Descartes configuration. The resulting circles are known as Apollonian packings. During the lecture, Reiter will present some of these results, both mathematically and visually.
In the past eight years, Reiter has mentored over 30 students through various academic projects and sponsored hiking trips in the Adirondacks and at national parks in Utah and Arizona. This past summer, he collaborated with Marquis Scholar Tim Zirkel ’08(Honey Brook, Pa.), a mathematics and computer science double major, on research modeling flowing fluid and Jordan Tirrell ’08(West Grove, Pa.), a mathematics major, exploring the Pythagorean theorem.
His work on the mathematical generation of snowflake patterns with Prince Chidyagwai ’05, who graduated with a B.S. in mathematics and an A.B. in computer science, has been featured by Nature magazine as the lead story on its web site. In 1998 and 1999, he received National Science Foundation grants for research on chaos and crystallographic symmetry. He published his book Fractals, Visualization and J, 2nd Edition, in 2000. He also serves as adviser for Ultimate Frisbee Club.