Public Lectures

We write and draw on paper, flat. We watch movies on screens, flat. We project 3 dimensional structures onto the plane, flat. From antiquity on, the plane has been key to our understanding of the world in all dimensions. I will introduce a notion of “planar algebra” and illustrate it in many ways, including some problems that are significantly harder in the plane than elsewhere, and explore the possibility of exploiting some strange physics in two dimensions.