The Weekly Newsmagazine of Science |Recently on MathTrek:| March
6, 1999 For a truly cool experience, there's nothing like
transforming a 12-foot, 20-ton block of manufactured snow into a
giant sculpture. That's the premise underlying the Breckenridge
snow sculpture championships in Colorado, held annually in
January. This year, the international competition featured 15
four-member teams representing 10 countries. It also had a
striking mathematical component. Noted mathematical sculptor
Helaman Ferguson, joined by math professors Dan Schwalbe and
Stan Wagon (see Riding on Square Wheels, July 11, 1998) and
student Tamas Nemeth of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn.,
labored intensively for 65 hours to carve a spectacular version
of a minimal geometric structure known as the Costa surface.
Wolfram Research sponsored the team, and Ferguson's wife,
Claire, photographed the event. The equations for this minimal
surface were discovered in 1984 by the Brazilian mathematician
Celso J. Costa. The figure's curvature