From Spheres to Möbius Strips: A Hands-On Journey Through SurfacesMaster ClassIn-Person
Wednesday, Dec 03, 2025
9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m
Our partner, Barnard College, is hosting this event.
In this master class, Barnard mathematician Dusa McDuff will guide participants through the fascinating world of surfaces: from the familiar Euclidean plane, sphere, and torus, to the quirky Möbius strip with its single continuous side, and the projective plane, where parallel lines don’t exist. With scissors, paper, and tape, we’ll bring these ideas to life, showing how simple experiments open onto deep questions like the famous four-color problem, whose seemingly playful premise challenged mathematicians for more than a century.
MATHEMATICS, GEOMETRY
Dusa McDuff
Dusa McDuff is the Helen Lyttle Kimmel ’41 Professor of Mathematics at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge, and served as a faculty member first at the Universities of York and Warwick, and then at Stony Brook University. McDuff has been awarded numerous honors, including the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize of the American Mathematical Society and honorary doctorates from the Universities of Edinburgh, York, St. Andrews, Strasbourg, and the Pierre and Marie Curie campus of the Sorbonne, Paris. A fellow of the Royal Society of London and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she is also a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society.