The
laws of mathematics would seem an unlikely subject for a Surrealist, yet Man
Ray turned rigid codification into unfettered creativity. In his 1963
autobiography, Ray recalled that it was the Surrealist artist Max Ernst who
first brought to his attention a group of three-dimensional models illustrating
mathematical equations at the Institute Henri Poincaré in Paris.

Ray photographed the models between 1934 and
1936, and published a dozen of the resulting images in a 1936 issue of the
French artistic and literary journal Cahiers
d’art, which was devoted to the Surrealist object.