Spotlight on Stereographic Projections

Watch Henry Segerman’s video chronicle.

One of the mathematical scenes that I’ve been involved with is the lighthouse. The top of the lighthouse will have two lights – one projecting horizontally from within a stained glass dodecahedron made by Bronna Butler, and the other projecting up on the the ceiling.

This will repurpose an old project of mine illustrating something called stereographic projection. Stereographic projection is a map from the sphere to the plane. So just like the Mercator map is a way of getting the continents of the globe on a flat piece of paper, stereographic projection is another way to do that.