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:
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.
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…
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.