5 Sievert Enneper Surfaces

G’day. Today’s math art is a rendering of 5 Sievert Surfaces (ocassionally called Siever-Enneper Surfaces) by Luc Bernard (different from the Luc Bernard who’s behind the cute game Eternity’s Child; not Luc Bernard the Canadian artist either).

Well, this Mr. Bernard is somewhat a mystery himself. I couldn’t find any website of his (save the news that he and Richard Palais made the background image for the Virtual Math Museum), but he made an awesome image nontheless.

So what exactly is a Sievert surface? Well, simply put, it’s the spherical extrusion of Descartes’ folium curve (a folium curve is essentially a curve that looks like a loop-the-loop). Basically, what that means is that if the folium curve is made into a sphere (by means of lathing it, if you work a lot with 3D programs), it would look like the objects in the image above.

I liked the surrealness of the image (I’ve seen some other works of Mr. Bernard) and I most definitely have to agree with him, mathematics is organic, and so beautiful. When put together, it is quite surreal, like you’re in an alien environment that you’re familiar with. This, I suppose, is the effect of math on humans, LOL.