Directly in front of Dallas Hall is the Class of 1916 Sundial. But over the years it has developed a problem: there’s nothing on it to cast a shadow! The piece that’s missing is called the style — a thin rod whose shadow lines up with one of the hour markings on the face of […]
The dome of Dallas Hall at Southern Methodist University is one of the most beautiful, striking, and symmetric structures on the entire campus.The entire structure has 16-fold rotational symmetry: if you stand at the center of the rotunda, look up at the dome, and then turn one-sixteenth of a full rotation, you will get exactly […]
The front of the Blanton Student Services Building poses a geometric puzzle. Or rather, the columns do: are the sides of the columns vertically straight, or do the columns become narrower as they go up? Of course, they appear narrower toward the top, but everything looks smaller the farther away it is. So how can […]
As we’ve seen in other posts, the elegant architecture of the Southern Methodist University campus is a rich source for seeing mathematical concepts in action. One technique that architects use to unify the design of a building is to have a repeated feature or shape that recurs in multiple circumstances in the building (much as […]
The study in symmetry continues inside the Hughes-Trigg Student Center, this time providing an excellent illustration of another important type, rotational symmetry. Check out the central gallery of the building. If you stand in the center of the room (right on top of the ubiquitous stallion), pick any direction and memorize what you see, and […]
Many mathematical concepts are important in architecture, and a particularly important one is symmetry. Rarely will you see a building so carefully displaying mirror symmetry as the lovely, neo-Classical Hughes-Trigg Student Center on the campus of Southern Methodist University. If you imagine a vertical line running from the highest point of the building straight down […]