Comments on: Wandering the Halls

By: Jean

Jean — Thu, 07 Aug 2003 04:10:29 +0000

I worked in the Coombs building for several years. It’s a brilliant place to work, as every room has a window to the outside or to one of the courtyards, full of trees and birdlife. If you religiously follow the arrows on the signs at every staircase, it is possible to find your way around without getting lost.

By: Jeremy Osner

Jeremy Osner — Sat, 02 Aug 2003 12:55:24 +0000

Michael—yes, you are of course right that it was not relevant to the original post; I was just trying overhard to be clever…

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Sat, 02 Aug 2003 07:28:23 +0000

I am pretty sure it is not possible to arrange three hexagons such that each of them shares precisely one side with each of the others. Whoops. So much for my lucid prose. “There’s these three hexagons stuck together in a row, kinda.” Gerry does ab initio quantum chemistry (whatever that is) so I am also embarrassed to have even loosely brought up the whole carbon thing.

By: Michael Kremer

Michael Kremer — Sat, 02 Aug 2003 05:48:13 +0000

jeremy, sorry. I was a bit confused. dsquared said that “I am pretty sure it is not possible to arrange three hexagons such that each of them shares precisely one side with each of the others.” That’s false, as you say (think of a pyramid), but also not relevant to the original post, at least as I read it. Kieran said “it is composed of three, three-storey hexagonal blocks each of which shares a side with one of the others.” That, I take to be saying that for each hexagon there is exactly one other hexagon with which it shares a side. I read dsquared’s post too quickly and took him/her to be objecting to that. What I said is: “it is impossible to have three hexagons each of which shares a side with exactly one of the other two” and that still stands even if the hexagons (or polygons) are not required to lie in one plane.

By: Jeremy Osner

Jeremy Osner — Sat, 02 Aug 2003 02:50:38 +0000

Michael—it is easy to make three polygons each share exactly one side with each of the others, unless we are required to keep them in the same plane.

By: Jacob T. Levy

Jacob T. Levy — Sat, 02 Aug 2003 01:34:45 +0000

I was going to post a comment earlier today about the resemblance between Coombs and the labyrinth in Name of the Rose, but decided it might sound pretentious. But now that one your cobloggers has mentioned Name of the Rose on the very same day… I never even figured out the basics of the room numbering system as you’ve described them here; and I was too embarrassed and self-conscious to ask anybody. I used to leave an extra half-hour or more for wandering the halls when I was going to a seminar or workshop in the building.

By: Michael Kremer

Michael Kremer — Sat, 02 Aug 2003 01:31:23 +0000

dsquared is right that it is impossible to have three hexagons each of which shares a side with exactly one of the other two. In fact it is impossible to have three polygons of any type each of which shares a side with exactly one of the other two. Ben Wolfson’s picture is of three hexagons each of which shares a side with both the other two. It is easy to prove dsquared’s claim (this is pretty trivial, if any mathematicians are watching). Suppose A, B and C are three polygons. Suppose two of them share a side; for example suppose A and B share a side. Now if C shares with A, A shares with two, not one. If C shares with B, B shares with two, not one. If C doesn’t share with either, then C shares with none, not one. QED

By: Laura

Laura — Fri, 01 Aug 2003 21:27:08 +0000

I’ve always thought you needed a degree in cartography to find a book in Firestone Library at Princeton. Compared to that, my experience with a riot-proof dorm of much the sort other people seem to be talking about was a breeze.

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 01 Aug 2003 18:55:40 +0000

“What you are dealing with, rather than “a gigantic carbon molecule” as Kieran would have, is 2-methylphenanthrene, a polycyclic aromatic,” A carcinogen, IIRC. (polyaromatic hydrocarbons with a “bay” are carcinogenic). “though that’s not as nice as it sounds.” They used to call ‘em polynuclear hydrocarbons, but it made the natives nervous, so they changed the terminology.

By: Mike Kozlowski

Mike Kozlowski — Fri, 01 Aug 2003 17:04:35 +0000

I’m always skeptical of claims that a building was designed to be riot-proof, because it sounds like so much folk lore. But whether or not it’s true, Wisconsin’s Humanities building is still a monumentally confusing building—largely because of the way that arbitrary walls in the middle of a floor make it impossible to continue on to the rest of the building, so you have to go back down two flights of stairs, exit, enter through another doorway, and back up the stairs.

By: Xhenxhefil

Xhenxhefil — Fri, 01 Aug 2003 16:54:44 +0000

Wean Hall at Carnegie Mellon is absolutely huge; the level you enter on from the main quadrangle area is the fifth floor; and there’s a seemingly simple system for room numbering that soon reveals itself to be inconsistent from floor to floor. And there is a staircase and two elevators, but they’re all contained in one column right at the middle of the building.

By: ben wolfson

ben wolfson — Fri, 01 Aug 2003 16:38:51 +0000

d-squared:

    
   / 
   / 
   / /
   _/

There’s an awesomely unnavigable building in the Freie Universitaet of Berlin, but I can’t remember what it’s called or much of its layout (unsurprising really). It was absolutely huge, and contained notional streets that didn’t really help finding one’s way about.

By: Scott Martens

Scott Martens — Fri, 01 Aug 2003 16:19:07 +0000

I nominate Le Pavillon Principal at the University of Montreal. The building is enormous and is built into a steep hill so that it has ground floor entrances on four different levels. Furthermore, there was a giant underground conveyor belt that ran from the Metro station at the bottom of the hill – some 30m lower – up to the lower entrances, and a system of tunnels from the new Z-wing that connected the building to the library complex to the west (another building embedded in a hill, with a student entrance on level 0 and a delivery entrance on level 7) and to the humanities buildings (a ten-story multi-building complex) off Boul. Côte-des-Neiges. When I was a student there, they had just renumbered all the rooms in the complex and so all the doors had two different numbers on them. The trouble was, there was some overlap between the two numbering schemes. The result was that looking for Locale D420 in the physics department could out you in the old D420, which was a women’s restroom in the dentistry department.

By: Gerry Hyde

Gerry Hyde — Fri, 01 Aug 2003 14:25:24 +0000

What you are dealing with, rather than “a gigantic carbon molecule” as Kieran would have, is 2-methylphenanthrene, a polycyclic aromatic, though that’s not as nice as it sounds. From what you say, there are plans for further methylation, which wont help one bit either. Go to: http://authors.elsevier.com/SampleCopy/362/S0045-6535(00)00077-1 for some analysis, or, depending on your perspectives, possible blueprints for future architectural developments.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Fri, 01 Aug 2003 14:02:08 +0000

The middle hexagon shares a side with both the other two …