McAllister Building at Penn State

McAllister Building is the home of the Department of Mathematics at Penn State. Located right next to the HUB-Robeson Center on Pollock Road, the building was constructed in 1904 as a men's dormitory. In 1915 it became a women's dormitory, and later was converted to an academic building. In addition to the Math Department, the McAllister Building also houses the University Park branch of the U.S. Post Office. In 2005 the building was re-dedicated after extensive renovations.

Learn more about McAllister Building at http://www.math.psu.edu/grad/info/mcallister.php online.

Read Penn State President Graham B. Spanier's re-dedication speech, "New Life for McAllister Building," at http://president.psu.edu/speeches/articles/181.html online.

View more photos of McAllister Building, including a photo of the Octacube sculpture that casts a shadow on the fourth dimension, at http://live.psu.edu/stilllife/1704 online. Watch a video about the sculpture at /video/166044/2013/02/09/video-no-title online.

To see more photos of McAlliseter Building, click on the image above. Credit: Annemarie Mountz / Penn StateCreative Commons

New mathematics based sculpture at Penn State looks beyond three dimensions. The sculpture, designed by Adrian Ocneanu, professor of mathematics at Penn State, presents a three-dimensional "shadow" of a four-dimensional solid object. Ocneanu's research involves mathematical models for quantum field theory based on symmetry. One aspect of his work is modeling regular solids, both mathematically and physically. In the three-dimensional world, there are five regular solids -- tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron -- whose faces are composed of triangles, squares or pentagons. In four dimensions, there are six regular solids, which can be built based on the symmetries of the three-dimensional solids. Unfortunately, humans cannot process information in four dimensions directly because we don't see the universe that way. Although mathematicians can work with a fourth dimension abstractly by adding a fourth coordinate to the three that we use to describe a point in space, a fourth spatial dimension is difficult to visualize. For that, models are needed. 

Last Updated June 8, 2011