Geometry Center Videos, Revisited

Page index: Intro | Written Material: Main Trilogy | Videos: Main Trilogy | Geometry Center Video Library Index

Intro

The trilogy of Geometry Center videos are now all legally available for free online! These videos brought brought concepts from geometric topology to general audiences through computer-generated visualization in the early 1990s. Not Knot, released in 1991, illustrates a remarkable swath of knot theory and hyperbolic geometry. Outside In, released in 1994, showcases Thurston's approach to turning a sphere inside out. The Shape of Space, finished in 1995, is about spaces that are finite but have no boundaries, covering some of the material in the book of that name by Jeff Weeks. These videos were shown at the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater, featured on the cover of Scientific American, and won awards at NICOGRAPH, the London Effects and Animation Festival, Prix Pixel Imagina, and Prix Ars Electronica.

These creations are no longer formally in print, since VHS tapes and DVDs are obsolete. The rights have now been reverted from the original publishers (AK Peters and Key Curriculum Press) to the authors. We are now able to post both the videos and written supplements for all to enjoy. The videos have been uploaded by many people over the years and viewed many millions of times (and even used for parody mashups!), but the written supplements had not been widely available.

In addition to the flagship videos, many more videos were created at the Geometry Center by visitors and summer interns, typically made in collaboration with the technical staff. Some were fully scripted and narrated videos that can stand alone. Others were intended as "video overheads", made to accompany a research talk given by a mathematician - quick to create, and without voiceovers. Many documented summer student projects. Over 200 physical videotapes were created, using a mix of single-frame recording and live on-screen demos. I have now digitized and uploaded most of the unique (finalized, non-draft) material that was the core of Geometry Center video library; the full list of what has been converted is below.

The Geometry Center was the short name of the NSF-funded National Science and Technology Center for the Computation and Visualization of Geometric Structures, which was located at the University of Minnesota from 1991-1998. Its precedessor, The Geometry Supercomputer Project, started in 1987. Video creation was only one of the many achievements of the Center; a good overview of the full scope of its mission and accomplishments is in the 1994 self-study report.

What spurred me to finally finish posting all of this material was a talk invitation from Gathering4Gardener Celebration of Mind in 2021. Here's the video of the talk: Geometry Center Videos, Revisited. Joining me for the Q&A at the end are several people who worked at or visited the Geometry Center: David Epstein, Colm Mulcahy, Silvio Levy, David Ben-Zvi, George Francis, Charlie Gunn, Stuart Levy, and Mark Phillips. See also the list of video clips shown.

Written Material: Main Trilogy

Videos: Main Trilogy

Geometry Center Video Library Index

For several tapes below, there's a note that the audio is mangled. (The technical issue: when we did single-frame recording on S-VHS tapes, we laid down timecode on one of the audio tracks. Our equipment at the time let us easily separate out that track on playback, to avoid the ear-splitting screech from treating that information as audio. Thirty years later, digitizing is (relatively) cheap, but the local video digitizing house doesn't have the professional-grade S-VHS decks with controls to filter out that screech.)
Tamara Munzner
Last modified: Sun Jul 2 22:16:32 PDT 2023