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Building Mathematics: The Maker Faire in Pictures
[Update 18/3/10 The student from my Communicating Maths course who helped out with the stall over the weekend has put his story up on the course's blog: Maths Students Read the Newspaper .] Last...
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Finding Ada: Alicia Stott Boole
View inside the shadow of the 120-cell. March the 24th is the birthday of Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. An icon for mathematicians and computer scientists as the first programmer. She developed...
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Socolar and Taylor’s aperiodic tile.
Almost the 3d monotile... As regular readers know I have a love of incomplete or impossible quests. One such quest that comes very close to my work is quest for an aperiodic tile. A shape that can...
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Lasering my Laptop
I finally got the courage together to put my laptop into my lasercutter. It worked! If anyone is interested this was using a 25W Versalaser at 100% power, 10% speed, 1000ppi (three powers of ten...
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Icosahedral Tiling Model
Following on from the “How do shapes fill space?” exhibit at the RSSE last year, the Science Museum accepted our offer of some of the zometool models. There were three classics, the 120-cell, 600-cell...
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Computers beat the devil?
I am a little behind the times on this, but Dave Richeson recently posted a quote from Michael Atiyah: Algebra is the offer made by the devil to the mathematician. The devil says: I will give you this...
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Islamic Geometry
Marc Pelletier is a geometric artist, one of the visionaries behind the amazing Zometool system and the designer and builder of 120-cell models including one given to John Conway at Princeton and one...
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Stars in the snow
Continuing the theme of maths sculptures interacting with snow fall, here are some pictures of my bamboo star. The original design was found by Akio Hizume, and I was introduced to the idea by Chaim...
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I find myself looking for a job…
I have a weird collection of skills. Mathematics, talking about mathematics, art, making… I am certainly missing opportunities, maybe because few know the skill set even exists! So its time to...
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Arrange whatever pieces come your way
(with apologies to Virginia Wolff) A simple, classic puzzle is to give two shapes and ask if there is a way to cut one up so the pieces can be rearranged into the other. This game might seem to become...
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Why not knot wire?
I have been thinking quite a bit recently about ideas of knotting and weaving. There will probably be another post on the theme soon. As a mathematician it brought me straight back to Knot theory, I...
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Hexayurt dome details and models
Edit 4/8/12: Andrew Maxwell, Tracy Suskin, Ying Yang, students at SAIT polytechnic in Canada, have put together the engineering details for the tri-dome. People are now starting to build my tri-dome...
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CAMel
CAMel is a project to develop Rhino Grasshopper components for CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing). Hence the silly name. It is very much work in progress, but if you are brave enough, here is a first...
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Hyperboloid lighting
The hyperboloid of one sheet is a fascinating shape that turns up in many places. It was therefore a great example to take for a test of thearender which I recently purchased. This shows off its double...
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2+2 = 1? Patterns in Modular arithmetic
When someone is talking about the absolute truth of mathematics and declares that once you have defined 2 and +, then 2+2 must equal 4, there is a slightly glib response: but 2+2 = 1…Mod 3 Despite this...
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Prime Phyllotaxis Spirals
The phyllotaxis spiral is one of the classical forms of mathematics, and there is a wonderland of resources available online both images and explanations. The basic idea is to put points round in a...
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The 2×1 rectangle and Domes
Next week I am going to be at the Gathering for Gardner, an exciting meeting of mathematicians, magicians, puzzlers and others inspired by the life and work of Martin Gardner. This post is a version of...
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Have we ever lost mathematics?
If you study the history of modern mathematics one of the recurring themes is the collapse of the foundations. A realisation that the assumptions underlying a topic were not as strong as might be...
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Permutations, weaving and wedding rings
For a strange variety of reasons, even though we have just celebrated our third anniversary the process of our wedding has only really just been completed. In particular I only recently got a chance to...
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Handcrafting the digital: Wedding rings
This is cross posted on Brian Lockyear’s Gnarly Architecture blog. Those interested in the intersection of the technical and artistic worlds (probably a majority given the topics of this blog) should...
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