We owe the T-shirt design and our 2007 contest logo to professor Marco Schlichting of LSU Math Department.

It portrays the blow-up of the xy-plane A² and of a curve C at the point P. The process of blowing-up is used in mathematics to resolve singularities.

For a more detailed description of the picture and its mathematical meaning please see the following article by professor Marco Schlichting:

Resolution of Singularities and Blow-ups

You can also find more information on the following Wikipedia pages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisuke_Hironaka
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_point_of_an_algebraic_variety
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolution_of_singularities