Polyhedra and simplicial chains
No. 109, 1973
(Algebraic topology)
India ink and pencil on paper, 31x42.5 cm.
In this grainy world of monolithic structures, an army of small beings stands aligned on a terrace, a virtual plateau. The space is wide, open, and hollow, almost an airless place filled with radiation bouncing off the slate-like surfaces and creating a chasm in which only a few beings can survive. An underlying notion here is of simplicial chains, or objects formed from elementary building blocks marked by numerical coefficients. We can add and subtract the chains as elements of an Abelian group, and by introducing boundary operators we can also compute boundary chains and define homology groups. Intuitively speaking, think of a chain as an arbitrary collection of blocks, bearing numerical markings.
