For the Museum of Mathematics
The column on do-it-yourself tensegrity generated a couple of interesting responses. First, “bonooboong” shared a design for a building that uses tensegrity as a sculptural element:
And second, Robert Coolman refined the classic six-strut tensegrity structure, using elastic hair bands for the tension elements to provide uniformity and color, and groups of four narrow dowels (skewers?) for the struts:
Note the clever arrangement of colors which results in all four colors meeting at every vertex, and in all four colors comprising every non-planar quadrilateral. Also, each possible set of three colors occurs on exactly two opposite faces of the icosahedron. mondays@momath.org is still accepting other mathematically meaningful tensegrity topics…
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