Simplicial spaces, cellular spaces, crystal and liquid
No. 190, 1976
(General ideas in geometry and algebra)
India ink and pencil on paper, 43x61.5 cm.
On this landscape of fantastic tumult, a lone figure escapes beneath a turbulent sky. Great planar objects grow out of the horizon, while the sky is convoluted as if it were a sponge, composed of foam partitions. The theme of this image is cellular spaces, which figure largely in the field of topology and can be formed easily by gluing together elementary bricks. The mental picture of a cell complex is of something pliable, soft, amorphous, flexible, and even animated—something like a deformed clay sculpture. In the image's upper right-hand corner, an enormous, strange crystal is evolving, one with a complicated symmetry group. Indeed, a branch of group theory is the classification of crystal structures, and in this case we can clearly see just how complicated the intrinsic symmetry of a crystal lattice can be.
