When we look out on a clear night, the universe seems infinite. Yet this infinity might be an illusion. During the first half of the presentation, computer games will introduce the concept of a "multiconnected universe". Interactive 3D graphics will then take participants on a guided tour of several possible shapes for space, illustrating the potential universes that lay at the heart of Thurston's pioneering work. Finally, we'll see how recent satellite data provide tantalizing clues to the shape of the real universe.

The only prerequisites for this talk are curiosity and imagination. For middle school and high school students, people interested in astronomy, and all members of the Princeton community.

About the speaker... Jeff Weeks fell in love with geometry in 12th grade when he read Flatland. While an undergraduate at Dartmouth College he bounced back and forth between math and physics, eventually settling on math and going on to study 3-manifolds with Bill Thurston and his students, whose colored-chalk approach to mathematics Jeff loved. After teaching at Stockton State College and Ithaca College, Jeff resigned to be a full-time dad for a few years. From there he fell into the life of a free-lance mathematician, at first part-time, then full-time. He enjoyed extensive work with the Geometry Center and the NSF as well as smaller gigs for science museums and teaching at Middlebury College. In 1999 an unexpected phone call brought a MacArthur Fellowship: five years of unfettered work on cosmic topology, along with time to finish the unit Exploring the Shape of Space; for middle schools and high schools. Jeff currently splits his time between puzzling over the microwave background and writing Macintosh versions of his geometry and topology software. Always working out of a home office, this year "home" is in Genoa, Italy, where his wife is doing sabbatical research.