A Mathematician and an Artist. The Story of a Collaboration Richard S. Palais 1 Appreciation In recent years it has become de rigueur for an invited speaker at a conference to “Thank the organizers for inviting me.” Today I can say this with more than the usual sincerity. Paris is my favorite city in the world, I have many fond memories of the Institut Henri Poincare ´, and the subject of this conference is very close to my heart. So to Claude, and all the organizers who have worked hard to make this conference a success. Merci bien. 2 Introduction Today I would like to tell you the story of perhaps the most enjoyable and stimulating collaboration of my career—my interaction with Luc Be ´nard. Luc is a talented creator of breathtaking mathematical art, and it really should be Luc standing here giving a talk at this conference, but unfortunately other commitments prevented him from coming to Paris at this time. While I appreciate mathematical art, I have little talent for creating it, and what I brought to our partnership was primarily technical knowledge and experience in creating software tools for representing mathematical objects as computer-based images. True, Luc has made good use of these tools, but I feel somewhat embarrassed by the excess credit I have received for his creations; it is as if one gave partial credit for the Mona Lisa to the artisan who created da Vinci’s paintbrushes. I looked back at my early email messaging with Luc recently. It shows that in early December of 2004, Luc was using my software, 3D-XplorMath (3DXM) and R.S. Palais (*) Department of Mathematics, University of California, Irvine, CA 92617, USA e-mail: palais@uci.edu C. Bruter (ed.), Mathematics and Modern Art, Springer Proceedings in Mathematics 18, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-24497-1_1, # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012 1