The Lawson surfaces are determined by their symmetries and topology

We prove that a closed embedded minimal surface in the round three-sphere which satisfies the symmetries of a Lawson surface and has the same genus is congruent to the Lawson surface.Comment: 15 pages, no figures, with minor improvement

Visions: Art Outside the Box at the Ohr-O\u27Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, Mississippi

The Ohr-O\u27Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, Mississippi, is the preeminent repository for the works of visionary Biloxi-born pottery master George E. Ohr (1857-1918). During his youth, Ohr was an apprentice to potter Joseph Fortune Meyer for approximately one year in New Orleans. It was during this time that he began to hone his artistic skills and to learn the mechanics of the pottery trade. After his apprenticeship, he traveled to potteries in sixteen states and numerous World\u27s Fairs to learn about techniques and glazes. He came back from his travels and assisted Meyer once again in New Orleans at the New Orleans Art Pottery, which was formed to glaze and fire pottery for the Ladies Decorative Arts League and operated under the auspices of Tulane University. Through this combination of traveling and apprenticing, Ohr developed his own vanguard style and manipulation of the clay medium. His once unappreciated and unvalued ceramic art pieces were embraced by the art world during the latter part of the twentieth century and exhibited in such venues as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Ceramic Art and the Smithsonian Institution\u27s National Museum of American History. Converse to aesthetic notions that were pervasive during the late-nineteenth century, Ohr\u27s whimsical and abstract ceramic masterpieces are injected with a delightful sense of humor; he did, after all, proclaim himself as The Mad Potter of Biloxi . He is widely considered to be a pioneer of the Modernist movement, and his inimitable art pieces continue to expand the boundaries of American art as a whole. While Ohr\u27s aesthetic originality and expert craftsmanship have been embraced only since the late-twentieth century, the Ohr O\u27Keefe Museum of Art stands to bear witness to a host of innovative artists for years to come. In tandem with the innovative spirit of George E. Ohr, the Museum proudly presents its newest exhibition, Visions: Art Outside the Box , which encompasses the self-revelatory work of five artists with deep Mississippi and Louisiana roots: Theodore Brooks, Martin Green, Charles W. St. Julien, Dr. Charles Smith and Willie White. These artists inhabit various mediums but all exemplify the visionary artistic experience of self-reflection, inventiveness, imagination and expression. This culturally rich and exceedingly diverse collection provides insight into the artistic heritage that pervades the Mississippi Gulf Coast

Disc stackings and their Morse index

We construct free boundary minimal disc stackings, with any number of strata, in the three-dimensional Euclidean unit ball, and prove uniform, linear lower and upper bounds on the Morse index of all such surfaces. Among other things, our work implies for any positive integer $k$ the existence of $k$-tuples of distinct, pairwise non-congruent, embedded free boundary minimal surfaces all having the same topological type. In addition, since we prove that the equivariant Morse index of any such free boundary minimal stacking, with respect to its maximal symmetry group, is bounded from below by (the integer part of) half the number of layers and from above strictly by twice the same number, it follows that any possible realization of such surfaces via an equivariant min-max method would need to employ sweepouts with an arbitrarily large number of parameters. This also shows that it is only for $N=2$ and $N=3$ layers that free boundary minimal disc stackings are achievable by means of one-dimensional mountain pass schemes.Comment: 55 pages, 8 figure

Pizzagate and a slice of free speech: Media literacy outside of the classroom

Since 2016, the public eye has turned to the problems of mis- and disinformation. As a result, many librarians sprang into action to spread the good news about information and media literacies. At the University of Kansas (KU), we initially joined the rush and created a media literacy LibGuide