Denver airport, Weierstrass, and A&S

Last night I was driving toward the Denver airport and the airport reminded me of the cover of Abramowitz and Stegun’s Handbook of Mathematical Functions.

Here’s the airport:

Denver airport

And here’s the book cover:

I’ve written about the image on book cover before. Someone asked me what function it graphed and I decided it was probably the Weierstrass ℘ function.

For more on Weierstrass’ elliptic function and why I think that’s what’s on the cover of A&S, see this post.

Photo of Denver airport via Wikipedia.

2 thoughts on “Denver airport, Weierstrass, and A&S

  1. The Weirstrasse elliptic is of course meromorphic with a convenient family of poles; and in particular it[s components] is[/are] Harmonic; meanwhile, the Denver Airport roof is (mostly) trying to be a Minimal Surface — which is really the differential geometer’s prefered version of “harmonic” — and suspended from a convenient family of poles…

  2. Sjoerd Visscher

    This might not be a complete coincidence since the Denver Airport roof is a minimal surface and Weierstrass’ elliptic function seems to be related to minimal surfaces.

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