Acknowledgements:

We would like to thank George Hersey for the suggestion that the study of columns by their symmetry might be interestingand worthwhile. Our discussion of symmetry and columns was a direct consequence of our participation in an interdisciplinary seminar on The Biology of Beauty as part of the symposium on Order, Complexity and Beauty organized by Tor Nørretranders at The Mindship in Copenhagen during the summer of 1996. MG is grateful for the opportunity to have participated in this seminar and for the support of interdisciplinary research that it provided.

We also thank Mike Field for pointing out the existence of the rod group classification. This research was supported in part by NSF Grant DMS-0071735.