| | | Professor Marjorie Senechal
~ On hiding in plain sight ~
Marjorie Senechal is a well known figure in the world of the aperiodic, not least for her wonderful book, packed with photographs and diagrams, Quasicrystals and Geometry (1995). Her encyclopaedic knowledge of geometric pattern made her the perfect person to walk us through the to-and-fro of artists and mathematicians mutually inspiring each other over the centuries to evolve current understanding. Her central theme was, “Why has it taken so long for the Hat to be found?” As an example of the dogmatic thinking that pointed researchers in the wrong direction she cited The Crystallographic Restriction which states that a rotation of a lattice in the plane or Euclidean 3D space can only have 2, 3, 4 or 6 fold symmetry. So when 5-fold symmetry was first observed it was dismissed as experimental error. Her talk, like the two before it, was a highly enjoyable discourse, setting the scene for the discovery of the Hat. A video of her talk is available.
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