The boundary of polyhedra can be diminished when they are glued together
No. 130, 1973
(Theory of polyhedra)
India ink and pencil on paper, 30x43 cm.
An alien world. Creatures living in a stepped landscape, rounding out their existence with light, in rebellion against the hard-edged, angular, local world in which they feel suspended. Polyhedra form the body and structure of this image, existing in the space until they are cut and glued together along their boundaries. Imagine that two polyhedra with boundaries are given. They are identified, glued together, and the boundary is actually diminished. This intuitively obvious circumstance lies at the basis of an important theorem in homology theory, that finds application in the modern theory of minimal surfaces. The picture also illustrates the process of cutting the Riemann surface of an algebraic function into the sheets of its single-values. In this picture, the cut is actually the fissure.
