A permanent IMAGINARY installation in the Mathematical Cabinet of the “Deutsches Museum” in Munich. At three interactive stations (Surfer, Cinderella and jReality) you can experience the beauty of mathematics and discover your own mathematical intuition by becoming creative yourself! The idea behind this installation is to bring the inconceivable or imaginary in mathematics to appear as an image.
SURFER
program
SURFER 1.7.0 setup for Windows 32-bit (Mac and Linux packages see below). PLEASE NOTE the info for Mac and Windows users at the end of the description text.
Licenses
Source code
Data
Credits
SURFER is a program by IMAGINARY in collaboration with the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach and the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg.
Website
Contributors
DirectionGert-Martin Greuel
ProgrammingChristian Stussak (Java renderer) Maik Urbannek (JavaFX), Henning Meyer (previous version)
Concept, CoordinationAndreas Daniel Matt, Anna Hartkopf
DesignChristoph Knoth
Advisor, GalleriesOliver Labs
GalleriesHerwig Hauser
TextsMaria Alberich, Jordi Buendía, Capi Corrales, Lara May, Anna Sabater and Emilio Sánchez
Supported by
SURFER and IMAGINARY are supported by the Klaus Tschira Stiftung (2011-2013) and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (2008–2009).
Related Events
The Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation invites you from July 20 to August 10, 2014, in the train station Heidelberg Altstadt, to cast a glance at mathematical creations “with the eyes of mathematics” in a way you might have never done before.
The exhibits belong to geometry, which is only one of many mathematical fields (albeit an important one) .
The exhibition visits Heidelberg for the first time and promises to be an exciting and varied experience for younger and older visitors alike.
With SURFER you can experience the relation between formulas and forms, i. e. mathematics and art, in an interactive way. You can enter simple equations that produce beautiful images, which are surfaces in space. SURFER is the Java-based extension of the program SURFER2008 that was developed for the IMAGINARY exhibition in the year of Mathematics in Germany.
Featured User Gallery
Valentina Galata, now student of bioinformatics in Germany, started to use the surfer as a high school student in 2008. She specialized in remodelling real world objects with SURFER. She found equations that create images of fruits, design objects or landscapes. Generally she adds several surfaces to one image by multiplying their equations, often variations of basic geometric figures, like spheres or cones.
Teapot
Moon
Christmas Eve
Engel
Dessert
Chess Piece
Key
Cocktail
Fly Agarics
Cherry Blossom
Karotte
Pear
Cherries
Spoon
Tasse
Mathematically, the program visualizes real algebraic geometry in real-time. The surfaces shown are given by the zero set of a polynomial equation in the variables x, y, and z. All points in space that solve the equation are displayed and form the surface. As an example look at x2+y2+z2-1=0, the equation of a sphere. You can easily see that the point (x,y,z)=(0,0,0) is not on the sphere while the points (1,0,0), (0,1,0) and (0,0,-1) for example solve the equation. The program includes a big sample gallery with explanations and a tutorial. It is available in several languages including German, Spanish, Russian, Serbian, and Portuguese.
The great thing about SURFER is that you don’t have to understand the underlying mathematics (algebraic geometry) a priori, you can experiment, try, follow your intuition and creativity and this way learn maths and create unique artwork like pictures or animations.
SURFER is the new, Java-based version of the program SURFER2008 that was developed for the IMAGINARY exhibition in the year of Mathematics 2008 in Germany. The program is platform-independent and runs on a Windows, Linux or Mac operating system. SURFER has been used for many IMAGINARY exhibitions and is constantly improved and extended.
NOTE FOR MacOS users: the SURFER app is not notarized. Please follow these instructions to override your security settings to open it (you will see a warning dialog).
NOTE for Windows users: in newer Windows versions, necessary DLLs are missing (msvcr100.dll) and they need to be installed to run SURFER. You can find the runtimes here under the title “Visual Studio 2010 (VC++ 10.0) SP1“ (we installed both 32 and 64 bit just in case).
