Outside In

At The Everything Seminar, Greg Muller points out that Outside In is available on Google Video. This was a little video illustrating sphere eversion, and aimed at a general audience. It was produced by The (now-defunct) Geometry Center, formerly of the University of Minnesota, which put a lot of effort into actually visualizing (and rendering) many geometric concepts. I’d try to explain sphere eversion, but the video’s only twenty minutes, so I’ll let that speak for itself.

I actually remember visiting the Center way back in the day on one of my family’s visits back to Minneapolis. It wasn’t really open to the public, but my father knew a guy from back before he failed his tenure bid at UMN. I’d run across Smale’s original eversion in an old issue of Scientific American, so he knew I’d like seeing this one. I actually still like Smale’s version for certain properties, but Thurston’s version (illustrated in the movie) is much easier to follow.

This reminds me of another, more famous video produced by the Geometry Center: Not Knot. And this video is also available online, this time at YouTube and in two parts. This one I highly recommend watching, and if it’s still up I’ll link back to it when I (eventually) get to knot complements in my own exposition. And I will. Remember that underneath all this category stuff I’m really a knot theorist.