The n-Category Café

Mathematical Images

Posted by Tom Leinster

Many mathematicians like the drawings of Escher, or sculptures of surfaces, or colourful plots of fractals and other mathematical phenomena. My own taste seems to be a bit different. I’m not sure how to describe it, but over the years I’ve amassed on my computer a small collection of “mathematical” images, in some rather loose sense of the word. Every time I save one I tell myself I might use it in a blog post one day, but every time I write a blog post, I forget.

Since I never use them, and since it’s Christmas, I thought I’d present them all here instead in one big gallery. Some illustrate some mathematical concept, some refer to the experience of being a mathematician, and a couple are silly visual puns. But many just ring a bell in a part of my mind that seems to me to be connected with the activity of doing mathematics.

I’m afraid I have no idea who any of them were created by (not me!); all have been downloaded from the internet at some point. If you want to find out, I’d suggest a reverse image search.

Merry Christmas! And don’t take the images too seriously — this is just for fun.

And finally, two which aren’t really images at all, but which I couldn’t resist including anyway: