Soap films and Kelvin's curved, truncated octahedron (Q2574448)

The author uses the Weierstrass representation for minimal surfaces to obtain parametrizations for two families of soap films spanning a rectangular prism with a square base. Both families can be extended to triply periodic soap films by rotations about the edges of the prism. By making the proper choice of the ratio of the height of the prism to the edge length of its square base an additional symmetry of one of the surfaces is obtained. In this way the author obtains a parametrization of the partition of \({\mathbb R}^3\) discovered by Lord Kelvin in 1887. For more than 100 years, until the work of \textit{D. Weaire} and \textit{R. Phelan} [Forma 11, No. 3, 209--213 (1996; Zbl 1002.52514)], Kelvin's partition was thought to be the most efficient equal volume partition of space; it remains the most efficient known equal volume partition utilizing congruent cells. Crucial to the construction is the fact that the boundary of each of the surfaces considered consists of principal curves and asymptotic curves. A significant contribution in this paper is the discovery of the relation between the developing map and the complex height differential of the Weierstrass representation.