Sculptor Helaman Ferguson '62 was profiled in the October issue of Science in an article titled "Carving His Own Unique Niche, in Symbols and Stone." Ferguson, a former mathematics professor at Brigham Young University, crafted the sculpture in front of Hamilton's Science Center. The article notes that after learning stone carving as a teenager, Ferguson wanted to study art as well as math. "He chose Hamilton College, a liberal arts school in upstate New York near where he had spent most of his childhood, where he could do both."
The article describes Ferguson's Science Center sculpture: "The work, made of 10-centimeter-thick granite, centers on a pair of massive disks representing the planets Mars and Venus. 'Venus' is exactly 161 centimeters in diameter - the height of the average female Hamilton student, taken from the records of one of the college's psychology professors. 'Mars' is 174 centimeters in diameter- the average male student's height. The disks are inlaid with tiles in a pattern defined by the Poincare and Beltrami-Klein models of plane hyperbolic geometry." Science subcribers may view the entire article at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/314/5798/412.
