Last edited 28apr16. Original 03jan01 by gfrancis@illinois.edu
Find this document at http://new.math.uiuc.edu/oldnew/zipproof

On Conway's ZIP Proof

Some years ago, John Conway found a particularly memorable way of proving the fundamental theorem of compact surfaces. Jeff Weeks wrote the text and I drew the pictures for an article Conway's ZIP proof in the Monthly.

This web page recalls how the pictures came about by email correspondence between Jeff and me, which was still pretty novel at the time. Here are some of the images from a talk on mathematical illustration I gave at Miami University of Ohio in 2014 in two formats zipproofPNGs and zipproofJPEGs.

The original web version of the power point slides, made with the Microsoft slide-to-web utility in 2000, no longer works in contemporary browsers.

Originally, I hoped that
"There will be more here as interest in this page becomes evident. We also intend to air interesting objections to Conway's ZIP Proof which we received in the mail after the publication."