When
Where
2025 Department of Mathematics Lecture
Seeing is Deceiving: The Mathematics of Visual Illusions
Illusions are a constant source of amusement. They are also a unique gateway into understanding the way we perceive the world and how the brain processes information—illusions were central to the development of the field of experimental psychology. The simplest visual illusions often involve a primary element—be it a line or a circle—that appears to distort or transform in the presence of surrounding elements, such as additional lines or dots. I will show that such perceptual interactions can be modeled through universal visual laws explaining a wide range of illusions. Grounded in models of the human visual processing system, such laws exhibit rich geometric structure and hence forge direct connections between the way our brain processes geometric information and the emergence of illusions.