home

The James R. Smail Natural History and Science Gallery was established in honor of James Smail, a beloved Biology professor and department chair, who died in 1993.  The mission of the Gallery is to communicate science in a primarily visual format.   All exhibits must meet three criteria.  The content must involve science, natural history, or mathematics.  The exhibit must have a strong educational component .  And, the exhibit must be visually striking.

Each year, a Department in the Science Division organizes an exhibit, which is mounted in the gallery for the entire academic year.  In many cases, the artist is invited and participates in the opening of an exhibit.  The gallery was created during the renovation of Macalester’s Science building during the mid-1990s.  With the generous help from alumni, friends, and family, a Smail Gallery endowment was created, which pays for the costs associated with the exhibits.

The Art of Venn Diagrams

Peter Hamburger and Edit Hepp

Peter Hamburger is a mathematician and his wife, Edit Hepp, is an artist.  Together they created a beautiful series of colored images illustrating Venn diagrams on 11 sets which are symmetric. These symmetric sets were discovered only in 2002, and since then it has been proved that symmetric Venn diagrams exist for n sets if and only if n is a prime number. Everyone knows the simple, symmetric Venn diagram on three sets. The ones on 11 are very complicated, and the remarkable images of Hamburger and Hepp were created entirely by hand by Hepp.    Curator:  Stan Wagon, Mathematics and Computer Science.

Macalester College · 1600 Grand Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105  USA · 651-696-6000
Comments and questions to Mark Davis davis@macalester.edu