Colorado State University 福利小视频 to Host Community Build of "Impossible" Mathematical Sculpture
Release Date: September 26, 2025
PUEBLO, Colo. (September 2025) – Colorado State University 福利小视频 will host a unique community sculpture build on Tuesday, September 30, beginning at 12:00 p.m., constructing a 2-3-meter-tall mathematical artwork that embodies one of geometry's most intriguing unsolved problems.
The project, organized by CSU 福利小视频 mathematics professor Tom Edgar and Museum of Mathematics founder Glenn Whitney, will invite students, faculty, and community members to help build what Whitney calls an "impossible solid" – a structure that appears to solve an ancient mathematical puzzle but actually demonstrates the beautiful uncertainty at the heart of mathematical inquiry.
The Mathematical Challenge
The resulting sculpture will stand 2 to 3 meters tall and depict an "impossible" solid — a proposed closest approximation to a polyhedron with regular polygon faces where a square and two pentagons meet at a vertex. While such a polyhedron is conjectured to not exist, the sculpture will visually resemble one due to the imperceptible error in the angles.
Whitney's design comes extraordinarily close to solving the puzzle, with an error rate smaller than the width of a human hair – less than 30 microns deviation from mathematical perfection. To observers, the sculpture will appear to successfully solve the geometric problem, though mathematical calculation reveals the hidden impossibility.
Community Engagement and Education
The collaborative build process reflects both organizers' commitment to making mathematics accessible and engaging. Edgar, who joined CSU 福利小视频 this fall after 16 years at Pacific Lutheran University, sees the project as an opportunity to change how people perceive mathematics.
"You talk to anybody and they’ll say, 'I hated math,'" Edgar notes. "If you probe longer, it's because they had some traumatic experience usually in high school, sometimes in middle school.”
Whitney, whose Museum of Mathematics in New York City has become a model for mathematical public engagement, emphasizes the collaborative nature of mathematical discovery.
"It's important that people see math as something that anybody can explore, that they themselves can explore," Whitney says.
Public Art with Purpose
The sculpture will be displayed outside the Physics and Math building for several months, serving as a lasting reminder of the beauty found in mathematical uncertainty.
"I hope that they see that math can be an unexpected source of beauty or curiosity in their lives," Whitney says. "If a bunch of people just say, 'Wow, what's going on there? Oh, there's more to math than meets the eye,' then job well done."
The project will also include smaller geometric pieces that will remain on campus permanently, allowing ongoing experimentation with alternative configurations.
