Prof. Robert Connelly, mathematics, holds up his finger for silence, intently concentrating as he frantically pushes buttons on a toy cell phone. A minute later his face lights up as he solves the puzzle, beating the game. Red lights next to each button light up in unison and Connelly proudly announces, “See this one is great because it has a great, ‘Aha!’ factor.”

Prof. Connelly's Office

Despite its commendable ‘Aha!’ factor, this cell phone is just one of many trinkets and puzzles littering Connelly’s office — it sits side-by-side with such varied acquisitions as an antique carpenter’s ruler, an array of multi-faceted dice, a few bizarre looking wood and metal models called tensegrites and just about every puzzle or cube ever produced by the Rubik’s company.

“My office … is like a museum of puzzles,” Connelly mused with an air of accomplishment. Aside from the fact that this veritable hands-on museum of mathematical models has been a work-in-progress since Connelly came to Cornell in 1969, Connelly can take pride in the fact that he has had a hand in proving theorems and publishing papers related to a large number of the items in his collection.

In fact, Connelly can even take credit for inventing some of the objects crowding his office. Picking up an intricate origami-like creation, Connelly said, “Here’s one of my inventions. It’s called a crinkle. It’s like origami, but origami is static — this moves.”

Whatever pride he derives from his role as the inventor of the crinkle, the focus of much of Connelly’s work has not been in the field of origami but rather the study of tensegrites (say: ten-SEG-ruh-tees).

Tensegrites, Connelly explained, are three dimensional shapes — like the row of models in front of his window — made out of wood and metal sticks but, because the structures are held together by tension, they have remarkable structural integrity and thus a tensegrite can be crushed or stretched. Instead of falling apart as a more rigid structure might, a tensegrite will bounce back to its original shape. Connelly summed it up, “Basically that’s my thing, studying what’s rigid and what isn’t.”

Although there are a number of toys in Connelly’s office collection, many of the items are actually work-related. For instance, the 19th-century folding carpenter’s ruler is a souvenir leftover from a paper he published in 2001 along with two of his colleagues. As he unfolded the ruler to demonstrate, Connelly explained, “I wrote a paper with Eric Demanie and Gunter Rota in which we proved that you can always open [a folding ruler] without it crossing itself. We proved it first.”

Similarly, the colorful collection of dice — despite obviously being stolen from various children’s games — do have a scholarly purpose. Connelly uses them to demonstrate basic geometric principles, a purpose for which his exact selection of dice shapes is well-suited because, as he said, “I have dice in all five regular solid shapes — tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron.” (That’s 4, 6, 8, 12 and 20 faces, respectively.)

According to Connelly, many of the Rubik’s cubes are in his office for a similar reason. He sheepishly admits, however, that not everything in his collection has such a scholarly explanation. As he picks up a brightly-colored two-dimensional puzzle called Rubik’s Magic in an unopened box labeled, “Ages 8 and up,” Connelly said, “Some of these things have a lower purpose, not a higher purpose.”

Prof. Hod Lipson, an engineering professor with a dual appointment in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and in Computing and Information Science, has an equally fascinating office of his own, augmented by a futuristic-looking laboratory across the hallway. The sci-fi feel of Lipson’s office is perhaps to be expected considering the nature of his work: “My work really relates to how machines can be creative and curious … it’s where engineering meets art.” In fact, this is the reason for the abundance of Legos in his office — he uses them to explain the nature of robot creativity and thought in relation to human thought.

Leaving his Lego-filled office, Lipson crossed the hall to his lab and, looking around the room, he explained, “There’s a lot of different types of robots we’re working on. Each one of them has a different story. Each one of them has a different concept that it demonstrates.”

For instance, the painting robot explores the nature of artistic creativity. As he shuffled through the robot’s stack of masterpieces, Lipson continued, “You give it a picture and it figures out a way to use its paints to reproduce the image … when you give it a picture it creates an abstraction of the image.” With a smile, Lipson added, “It has a good picture of Jimi Hendrix.”

Next, Lipson pointed to a series of shelves filled with orange, blue and white cubes, explaining that the cubes are actually robots. Each set of cubes is, according to Lipson, “… essentially a self-replicating machine. It is very simple [because] it only has four pieces but what we’re aiming for is a machine that has a million pieces and can make a copy of itself.”

Moving over a shelf, Lipson gestured to a somewhat frightening spider-like robot, saying, “This robot over here is one that learns and creates a self-image.” He paused before explaining further: “It’s a bit tricky to explain most engineering that robots have … but this robot doesn’t know what it looks like and as it moves gradually it begins to create an image of itself.” As the robot begins to move around, Lipson said, “… we can watch it create a self-image.”Prof. Lipson's Self-Imaging Robot

While Connelly’s office is filled with souvenirs from his own work, Lipson is quick to point out that his office display is student-made. He explained, “Usually a student owns a robot. They work on it for a couple semesters and usually it’s not robust [because] it’s aimed at illustrating a principle.”

The decor in the office of Prof. Thomas Hirschl, sociology, is perhaps slightly more conventional; on the wall above his desk hangs what appears to be a 17th century European portrait painting. According to Hirschl, the portrait is an image of Jean Baptiste Colbert, “[Who] was a French banker and government official in pre-industrial France.”

Hirschl went on to explain the painting’s relevance to his work studying social stratification and demography: “[Colbert] built up the economy of France at the expense of small business owners and peasants and it’s an interesting history that we as academics tend to overlook.”

Given the parallels Hirschl sees between the French economy in Colbert’s time and the American economy and its approach to poverty, Hirschl said, “This painting … is my little study in comparative politics in one artwork I like.”

Aside from its academic relevance, though, the painting holds an added relevance for Hirschl because this particular painting is actually a copy painted by his brother-in-law. The original, by Phillippe de Champaigne, was painted in 1655 and today hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Though Prof. Veit Elser is a physics professor, his desk is covered with a series of tangram-like puzzles — some of which seem more fitting in a nursery school than an Ivy League office. All of Elser’s puzzles, toys and molecules in his office are there for good reason: “I come up with things that theoretically have these curious properties and I’m not just satisfied with demonstrating it on paper with an equation or something, so to really make it come to life or excite somebody I have to build it out of real materials.”

For instance, when he designed a computer algorithm able to solve circular packing puzzles he acquired one such puzzle for his office. The pink circular packing puzzle in Elser’s office was created by renowned computer scientist Bill Gosper, who began commercially marketing a circular packing puzzle with only one unique solution — only one way to fit a series of small circles into a larger circle. Elser explained, “I take pride in my algorithm being able to solve any puzzle and that impressed [Bill Gosper] as well…so he sent me this copy of his puzzle.”Prof. Elser and Packing Puzzles

Elser doesn’t just solve these circular packing puzzles, though — he also makes them. Next to Gosper’s pink puzzle lies a copy of Professor Elser’s own metal circular packing puzzle, which was designed by another of Elser’s algorithms.

A labyrinthine molecule sits on a set of drawers next to the Elser’s desk as another example of his attraction to three-dimensional models. After turning around briefly to look at the large molecule, Elser explained, “It’s a proposed model of soot … you might ask what is soot really like and this model looks like it might come close to what soot is.” He continued, “It’s sort of like graphite but it has a strange interconnectivity because of its seven-sided shapes.”

If Elser’s office seems appropriate for nursery schoolers, the office and laboratory of Prof. Linda Rayor, entomology, would almost certainly make many young children scream — Rayor breeds, studies and collects spiders and insects. Before coming to Cornell 15 years ago, Rayor’s work focused on wasps but, she said, “I started teaching spiders for the first time in 1994 … and then I basically went tarantula crazy.”

Though some of Rayor’s specimens are already in the Smithsonian’s collection, usually she prefers collecting live specimens. She said, “It’s one thing to show a pickled thing in a jar — it’s quite another to show a beautiful tarantula eating a cricket, live.”

Her live specimens include everything from orb-weaving spiders to Hunstman spiders to giant millipedes and everything in between. Though any other person might find Rayor’s collection to be overwhelmingly large, she said that as a result of her methodology the number of specimens usually grows more slowly than she might hope. Rayor explained, “A lot of people go out and catch insects and kill them. Since I study them I wait until they die of old age and go out and pickle them and so it takes a while to build up a collection like this.”

The first thing one notices upon entering the office of Prof. Joseph Burns, theoretical and mechanical engineering and astronomy, is simply its sheer size — the room with its spacious vaulted ceiling was constructed in an era when engineering professors needed space for room-sized machinery. Given the vast size of his office, though, it seems fitting that the items that Burns seems to take the greatest pride in are the series of framed magazine covers featuring pictures from the Saturn mission he is involved in. He pointed to one picture and began, “I have a picture here from National Geographic when this image was on the cover.” Pointing to a tiny speck in the background he continued, “ … and this little speck here is the Earth.”

As he pointed to the next picture he went on, “Then the following month the same image is on the cover of Discover Magazine and they airbrushed out the earth because they thought it was a speck of dust.” Burns’ images have gotten plenty of attention; they were used in the Johnson Museum’s “Spectacular Saturn” exhibit. Such attention, it seems, is well-deserved given the number of years Burns has put into this research.Prof. Burns' Saturn Photographs

“I’m a member of a space craft team and our space craft is in orbit around Saturn right now. It’s been there four and a half years and for the exhibit we just selected 60 images out of almost 300,000 images and then we had them mounted beautifully. We actually have two sets of these images and one is at the American Museum of Natural History and the other is at the National Air and Space Museum.”

In addition to pictures of Burns’ research, there are also such assorted items as his undergraduate ship sketches from his years spent in a naval architecture school, his wife’s over-sized cloud paintings, globe models of the Earth and Venus and a box full of toys he uses to demonstrate physics concepts. As Burns explained wryly, “I also have a tree from the living room that doesn’t fit in the living room any longer.” After all, in a day where many of the world’s most impressive machines fit in a backpack or even a purse, construction decisions from bygone eras now merely provide space for a lifetime of clutter — or, as Burns put it, “There are disadvantages to having a big office.”

In rooms both big and small, profs all across the University fill their offices with the stuff of their lives — both personal and academic — and by taking the time to venture into a prof’s domain to ask questions, students can find out fascinating details about even the most boring of professors.