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Arts and Geometry final project

Description

I was inspired to draw this to make sense of the universe described in Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Library of Babel.” The narrator in Borges’s story describes their universe as a seemingly infinite stretch of hexagonal rooms, forming a library that contains all possible permutations of books with 410 pages, each with 40 lines composed from 25 characters. Each room has four walls of bookshelves and two walls with a door to a neighboring room. The library is described as having a symmetry such that any room seems to be the center of the universe. The number of books must be finite if there are no repetitions, but the library cannot have an edge without breaking its symmetry, so, it is believed that the library must be periodic. Such a periodic universe is often depicted as existing on the surface of a torus (or hypertorus). I adopted the torus model. However, the library is so large that a view this torus would appear as either a flat plane or a cylinder stretching infinitely. To make the view more interesting, I warped the cylindrical view to appear more like a torus (acually a Dupin cyclide) by distorting “the point at infinity” to lie closer to the viewer. This warping was achieved with a sphere inversion.

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