Collection of Mathematical Models Receives New Treasures

On September 23, 2021, Roland Seifert donated 35 historical models to the TU Dresden

The collection of mathematical models of the TU Dresden has become richer by some treasures. Roland Seifert has transported his private collection from Oberursel to Dresden and handed it over to Prof. Daniel Lordick. This means that the Faculty of Mathematics can now finally once again display those iconic plaster models that were created in Germany around 1900 and distributed worldwide by the Martin Schilling publishing house. These include, for example, the Clebsch Surface, whose formal beauty has inspired great sculptures and has been immortalized by photographers such as Man Ray and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

The TU Dresden previously had only a few of these models, as the original teaching collection of the Royal Saxon Polytechnic Institute was destroyed in the bombing of 1945 along with the main building on today's Friedrich-List-Platz. Thus, it was not until around 1960, when the Martin Schilling publishing house was dissolved, that some models came from Leipzig to Dresden.

All the more thanks to Roland Seifert for parting with his collection and donating it to the faculty - with a heavy heart, as he admits. After all, he had saved the models from disposal in the early 1980s. Most recently, the physicist has been involved in the manufacture and sale of 3D scanners, which are used, for example, to fit hearing aids to the individual shape of ear cups. The specially produced 3D scan of one of his mathematical models served as the logo for his company in Oberursel. In this respect, the donation closes the circle to the DAMM digitization project of the Dresden collection.