Special Topics:Topology

These are general conics on the projective plane. A lattice of circles, lying on a plane tangent to the unit sphere has been normalized to lie on the unit projective plane. Regardless of the conics chosen in the original plane, similar images (spherical ellipses) would be derived by this procedure. Note that the circles seem to be in perspective, at least if you only look at a small portion of the image. This is far from coincidental.

How to make it: Mathematica produced GeomView output, rendered by RenderMan.

Image created: June 1995

Copyright © June 1995 by The Geometry Center, University of Minnesota. All rights reserved.
For permission to use this image, contact permission@geom.umn.edu.

External viewing: small (100x100 7k gif), medium (500x502 119k gif), or original size (757x760 321k tiff).

Comments to: webmaster@geom.umn.edu
Created: Thu Jun 25 15:09:39 CDT 1998 --- Last modified: Thu Jun 25 15:09:39 CDT 1998