Banchoff recalls Dali's multidimensional friendship

Brown professor is part of a documentary celebrating the artist's centennial

by Tracie Sweeney

Shortly after the Washington Post published an article in January 1975 about his pioneering work using computer graphics to illustrate geometry beyond the third dimension, Thomas Banchoff got a call from an agent representing artist Salvador Dali.

"Either it was a hoax, or Dali wanted to sue," said Banchoff, for accompanying the article was a picture of Dali's 1954 painting "Corpus Hypercubus," (left) in which the crucified Jesus is shown on an octahedral hypercube. Banchoff, a geometer at Brown since 1967 whose work includes some of the first high-quality animations of hypercube phenomena, feared the worst.

But Dali, who was staying at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City, merely wanted to meet the man who shared his fascination with the visualization and interpretation of mathematic forms in the fourth dimension.

The memories of meeting the flamboyant artist and the ensuing decade-long friendship are particularly fresh in Banchoff's mind these days as Europe celebrates the centennial of Dali's birth with major retrospective exhibitions, symposiums and other events. Banchoff is working with a crew filming "The Dali Dimension," a documentary to air in Europe this fall. In March, he accompanied the crew to New York City to recreate the St. Regis gathering, and he traveled to Spain to speak at a conference about Dali and science at the Institut d'Estudis Catalans in Barcelona.

Dali's earlier works are perhaps best known for their surrealism - think of the drooping clocks in his 1931 painting "Persistence of Memory." But after World War II, he began to play with perspective, and his work increasingly included religious and scientific figures.

Some critics have described Dali's use of such mathematic imagery as hypercubes, dodecahedron and flexion points as "visual opportunism" or "symbolic allusion." But Banchoff has no doubt the artist had a scientific mind.

"Dali wanted to be treated seriously by scientists," Banchoff said. "He knew what he was talking about; he was not just using the symbols." During the decade that he and Banchoff conversed, Dali also met with other scientists, including geneticist James Watson and French mathematician Rene Thom, the inventor of catastrophe theory.

Banchoff's initial meeting with Dali at the St. Regis "was an event. He held court. ... People would come to see him and be seen with him." But amid the circus-like atmosphere, Dali "demonstrated deep interest in knowing about aspects of my work ... and had some very specific mathematical questions to ask," Banchoff said. Dali had been working with stereo optics and perspective in an effort to create an entirely different kind of image within the brain, akin, perhaps, to the Magic Eye stereograms popular in the 1990s, but with a transcendental twist. "He was having technical problems," Banchoff said, and was asking about lenses, mirrors and holograms ("which he sneered at").

Over the course of their friendship, they shared an interest in philosophy and discussed the great thinkers who had influenced their lives. One of their longer-running collaborations, however, was on a giant sculpture of a horse that would appear distorted from all but one angle. "We talked about the mathematics of the project, which weren't too difficult," Banchoff said: The shoulders of the horse would be 100 meters from the head, and the rump would be 300 kilometers away. Each time they met, the dimensions would get more extreme. Ultimately, Banchoff said, Dali envisioned a horse whose head would be in front of the viewer, whose shoulders would be on a mountain in Spain and whose rump would be somewhere on the moon. "It was the same mathematics - the concept would work," Banchoff said. "But it was clear that this was a project of the imagination."

Maybe so. But the tale of Dali and the horse struck the fancy of a group of students in Banchoff's Math 8 course last year. They constructed a version of Dali's horse, to Banchoff's delight.