- #1
- 4,652
- 37
I was just reading a very cool article called "Knit Theory" in the March issue of Discover magazine. Mathematician Daina Taimina came up with the very clever idea of representing hyperbolic geometric forms as crocheted models.
The idea was born out of necessity when she went to teach a class on hyperbolic geometry at Cornell, and the classroom model for a hyperbolic plane was a very fragile and shopworn creation which had been fashioned by taping together thin paper strips. "So I spent the summer crocheting a classroom set of hyperbolic forms," she said.
Here are some samples of her work on display at The Institute for Figuring:
http://theiff.org/oexhibits/05b.html
These are particularly interesting to me because I have constructed several similar looking objects by "happy accident" when I was learning to crochet!
The idea was born out of necessity when she went to teach a class on hyperbolic geometry at Cornell, and the classroom model for a hyperbolic plane was a very fragile and shopworn creation which had been fashioned by taping together thin paper strips. "So I spent the summer crocheting a classroom set of hyperbolic forms," she said.
Here are some samples of her work on display at The Institute for Figuring:
http://theiff.org/oexhibits/05b.html
These are particularly interesting to me because I have constructed several similar looking objects by "happy accident" when I was learning to crochet!