Complex Geometry and Beyond's Logo

Sébastien Dégeilh et Gaëlle Sandré's design studio rovo designed posters for the thematic trimester and its related events.

The two designers from Toulouse took inspiration from images of mathematics and their aesthetics in order to construct the logo of Complex Geometry and Beyond. The actual logo is indeed a solid object, a little polystyrene sculpture which was created by Sébastien and Gaelle themselves. Their main source of inspirations are plaster models of surfaces which one can see in almost any math department or in some scientific libraries, and in particular the pictures of the japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Though the beauty of some of those models attracted their attention, designers were aware that these objects have a precise menaning to mathematicians and that a specific choice of one of them could have sound odd if compared to the scientific content of the trimester. They then decided to create themself a "new" solid which would have represented the trimester.

They took the three initial letters (K, R, and N) of the three main events of the trimester, and they produced a three-dimensional shape by cutting a polystyrene cube in such a way that on the three faces of the cube one could read each of these letters, say down face for K, right face for R and front face for N. This choice is also closely related to one of their main questioning in designing: letters are commonly used as 1 or 2 dimensional objects, could we give them a third dimension? Moreover, this choice is meant also to recall the fact that one complex dimension corresponds to two real dimensions: here, letters are represented as surfaces in the real space, as much as complex curves are Riemann surfaces in the real space.

The coloring of the solid is then realized via a grpahic design software to imitate colors (rgb) that are usually used by mathematical softwares to represent 3-dimensional objects on a screen. The images on the 4 different posters are all obtained from the actual sculpture of the "complex-geometry-and-beyond" surface. Each is obtained by taking a different perspective: for a single event, the point of view is such that the letter corresponding to the event is recognizible, while for the main poster the point of view is such that no letter is privileged.

The 4 points of view of the solid: (from left to right) the "skew" one used for the main poster, the "K" for KAWA7, The "R" for Recent advances in complex differential geometry, and the "N" for New methods in birational geometry