Student Work from Graphic Design Course Featured in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Publication

Work by math and graphic design students Hannah Schriever, John Byers, Daniel Easley (Graphic Design alum, 2018), and Christian Pierson has been selected for the cover of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America’s (PNAS) current publication. The model featured on Volume 115, Issue 43 was published on October 23, 2018 and was produced during the spring 2018 interdisciplinary course Math Outreach Design Lab, taught by Associate Professor of Mathematics David Gay and Associate Professor and Graphic Design Moon Jang.

PNAS is one of the world’s most-cited and comprehensive multidisciplinary scientific journals, publishing more than 3,200 research papers annually. Established in 1914, PNAS publishes cutting-edge research, science news, Commentaries, Perspectives, Colloquium Papers, Reviews, and actions of the National Academy of Sciences. The journal’s content spans the biological, physical, and social sciences and is global in scope. Nearly half of all accepted papers come from authors outside the United States.

The image is a physical model of a trisection of a knotted surface in 4-dimensional space, the spun trefoil, showing selected slices through a projection of the surface into 3-dimensional space. Four-dimensional manifolds are notoriously difficult to understand and describe, but they can be “trisected” which means that they can be built from three simple building blocks. The Trisections of Smooth Manifolds Special Feature describes various developments in the use of trisections to characterize 4-dimensional manifolds.