Friday, February 15, 2013
Room 311 (Hynes Convention Center)
What do forest canopies, reticulated giraffes, fish boundaries on sandy lake bottoms, dragonfly wing venation, cross-sections of leaves, fiddler crab flocking behavior, epithelial cell boundaries, drug design, packing of side chains in proteins, bird territories, spider webs, stony coral colonies, and amoeba that live in glass houses share in common? Do biological systems construct more complicated tessellations than M. Escher's fantastic puzzles of fish, birds, butterflies, shells, and reptiles? Why? How does mathematics help us both appreciate aesthetic alternatives to symmetry in nature and to better understand the behavior of biological systems? How is this useful to medical imaging for prognosis and diagnosis of various cancers? Professor Jungck has presented mixtures of art, biology, mathematics, and education at the Seralves Museum in Porto, Portugal as well as around the world in numerous countries: Thailand, New Zealand, Brazil, Chile, China, Ukraine, France, Germany, South Africa, Canada, Mexico, … He has developed such software as 3D FractaL Tree that allows students to build realistic three dimensional computer models of trees from just a few measures on actual trees. He maintains an “Art Gallery of Mathematical Biology” developed by his students over 33 years.