Warped Realities: The Art of Differential Geometry

Lightfall, The Geometry of Spacetime, Geodesic Woodcuts, and Many Paths to the Beach, shown in MoMath's "Warped Realities" exhibition.

with Edmund Harriss, Henry Segerman, Robert Fathauer, Stepan Paul

Venue
National Museum of Mathematics
Location
New York, NY
Dates
June–August 2025
Space(time)
Space(time) Prints on metal (diptych), 20 × 30 in each Still life dyptich in flat space, and in a spacetime with multiple black holes
Geodesic Boards
Geodesic Boards Engraved wood (CNC), 6 × 12 in Wooden boards with geodesics engraved in them.
Lightfall
Lightfall Print on metal, 20 × 30 in Lightcones in spacetimes with multiple black holes.
Many Paths to the Beach
Many Paths to the Beach Print on metal, 20 × 30 in Intrinsic view of the geometric connect sum of a flat 3 torus and euclidean space.

Warped Realities: The Art of Differential Geometry was a group exhibition at Composite on Fifth, the National Museum of Mathematics’ own gallery in New York, curated by Chaim Goodman-Strauss. It ran from June to August 2025.

The show started as a plan Edmund Harriss and I made while I was visiting him in Arkansas, with other people in mind from the beginning. We wrote to them, and the group kept growing as the proposal went through MoMath, until it settled into a show gathered around hyperbolic geometry and curvature.

Four of my works were shown. Lightfall and The Geometry of Spacetime hung together on a wall about black holes: the first traces the light cones of a static multi–black-hole spacetime, the second sets the same still life in flat space and then in that curved one, so the two panels differ only by the geometry light travels through. Many Paths to the Beach hung beside them.

Geodesic Woodcuts, made with Edmund Harriss, was the piece visitors could touch. Six cherry surfaces are milled with families of geodesics, and the wall text asked people to run a finger along a groove and decide whether it was straight. It is a fair question to put to a hand rather than an eye: a geodesic has no acceleration within its surface, so nothing drags your finger to either side as you follow it.

The Black Holes wall: Many Paths to the Beach at left, the two panels of Space(time) at right.
Lightfall, with one of the carved geodesic boards mounted at the centre of the group.
The wall text for Geodesic Boards, made with Edmund Harriss.
Six of the boards. Visitors were invited to run a finger along the grooves and feel that the curves are straight.
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