Ephemeral Shapes -Northampton MA

Wonderful - for two reasons. It is a great photo. Second it shows the solution to a hard mathematics problem. A soap bubble is the shape with minimal area that encloses a given volume. If you have two soap bubbles that share part of their surface, the bubbles assume the shape that encloses two disconnected regions of space with the least area. This is called the double bubble problem and was solved recently. if you have a soap film that spans a "circular" piece of wire then the film is the shape with minimal area spanning that wire. Of course if the wire is in a plane then the shape is just that portion of the plane inside the wire. For many years UMass was one of the great centers for the study of these shapes.