The Mathematician behind Bubbles

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]In honor of International Women in Math Day, I want to tell you about some of mathematician Jean Taylor's work. These are soap films that create beautiful minimizing surfaces, and they obey four laws. For instance, that's why you always see three planes intersecting in one line and four lines intersecting in one vertex with very precise angles.

[00:00:23]Well, these laws were proposed by Plateau back in the 19th century. It was Jean Taylor who used a field of math called geometric measure theory to provide the formal proof that this must always occur back in the 70s. So, happy International Women in Math Day, everyone.