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MatheMUSEments
Four Corners, Four Faces
By Ivars Peterson
Muse, April 2000, p. 26.
To Arthur Silverman, a sculptor in New Orleans, tetrahedrons,
or triangular pyramids, are very special. He's been creating
sculptures based on the tetrahedron for more than 20 years. You
might see examples on display in plazas and office buildings in
New Orleans, San Francisco, and other cities in the United States.
Until the age of 50, Silverman had been a successful surgeon.
He gave that up, however, to return to interests that had
captured his attention when he was a teenager and had visited art
museums and tried carving wood.
To make a tetrahedron, imagine four points in
space. If you join all of the points, the points become the
corners of four triangles. The four triangles form the faces of a
tetrahedron.
"The tetrahedron is very exciting visually,"
Silverman says. "It's difficult to anticipate what you are
going to see." For example you can stretch several edges of
a tetrahedron to create a slim, tall tower. Silverman has a pair
of such towers, each 60 feet high, in the middle of a plaza
fountain in New Orleans.
The Energy Centre fountain in New Orleans, a
sculpture by Arthur Silverman, is made of two tetrahedrons.
You can join tetrahedrons together to create an
angular wall down which water can tumble and fall. You can stack
them in various ways to create a monument. Or you can balance
then on edge or on a corner.
You can also slice tetrahedrons to get
interesting cross sections, which can then be used as tiles to
cover a wall. You can divide tetrahedrons into intriguing pieces,
and then rejoin them in various ways. The possibilities seem
endless.
If each face of a tetrahedron is an
equilateral triangle, the result is a regular tetrahedron, one of
the five Platonic solids.
Silverman has produced more than 300 sculptures
based on the tetrahedron. "When I get an idea, I play with
it as long as I can," he notes.
Sometimes it takes an artist to reveal the many
wonders of a seemingly simple geometric form like the humble
tetrahedron.
You can learn more about Arthur Silverman's art at www.bilhenrygallery.com/silverman/
and www.lemieuxgalleries.com/artist_silverman.html.
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