Mathematics in stained glass
I work in a beautiful old building at The University of Manchester called The Sackville Street Building. Yesterday, I took part in a very interesting historical tour of the building and was astonished at the amount of beautiful things that I had never noticed before and yet walk past every day.
For example, I was delighted to discover that one of the stained glass windows in the great hall was themed around mathematics (thanks to Samantha Bradey for the original image which I’ve heavily compressed for this blog post)
While on the tour I posted a quick snap of the above window to twitter using my mobile phone and received some nice feedback along with a few pictures of other mathematical windows. It turns out that Manchester’s Nick Higham has a close up of the above window for example. Also, Kit Yates tweeted about several mathematical windows in Caius College, Cambridge, one of which is below (showing images related to Venn and Fisher).
Do you know of any other examples of mathematics in stained glass? Feel free to contact me and tell me all about it.
Mike, I remember five of them at Caius, and I believe all related to math/science. I got the tour from Professor A E (Tony) Edwards who had input into at least the Fisher window. He was Fisher’s last graduate student. He also gave me directions to Venn’s grave at Trumpington which was covered with very sharp bushes. I came back with some of my HS students and we hacked them out and planted some bulbs to come out in a Venn diagram in Red White and Blue, but when we returned they had been mowed into a very short diagram.