Math Monday: Temari balls

By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics

Temari balls are a traditional Japanese craft in which colored thread is applied to a sphere in a geometric pattern. This is a modern example, given to me by the Japanese master Kiyoko Urata.

There has been a repopularization of temari recently by people such as Carolyn Yackel at Mercer University, who teaches and writes about their underlying mathematics. Below is an example of her work with thirty rectangles centered on the two-fold rotation points of the icosahedral symmetry group.

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