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Stepan Paul, Harvard, Isoptics, or how to design the perfect stadium
February 4, 2020 | 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm EST
How could you design a stadium so that a rectangular playing field looks the same size to every spectator? What about for a circular wrestling ring? In this talk, we study these and related questions, which can all be viewed as generalizations of Thales’ Theorem—that a line segment L in the plane “looks the same size” from every point along the circle whose diameter is L. By design, the results I will present raise more questions than they answer, hopefully inspiring new directions of inquiry.