Math Monday

Creating a Knitting Needle Hypercube Shadow

Creating a Knitting Needle Hypercube Shadow

By Glen Whitney

Glen Whitney

Executive Director, Museum of Mathematics

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There has been lots of making going on at MoMath lately, which we’ll take a look at over the next few posts. Recently, one of our Math Encounters speakers needed a projection of a hypercube into three dimensions as part of a demonstration. So we used Great Stella 4D to make a nice projection in general position, in which no two vertices coincide in three dimensions, and then used the measuring tool in the program to get the edge lengths.

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Plenty of Polyhedra

Plenty of Polyhedra

By Glen Whitney

Glen Whitney

Executive Director, Museum of Mathematics

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Today’s will be the last Bridges column, at least until next year — not because there isn’t plenty more to share, but because there have just been too many other things stacking up on the Math Mondays shelves. The final installment for this year is devoted to polyhedra and some of the incredibly diverse ways they can be presented.

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Recurring Themes at Bridges

Recurring Themes at Bridges

By Glen Whitney

Glen Whitney

Executive Director, Museum of Mathematics

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Just two more posts on the mathematical wonders found at Bridges 2013 — not because there wouldn’t be more material, but because there are so many other topics to pursue. Today’s post focuses again on themes which have occurred earlier in the annals of Math Mondays and which showed up with some very sophisticated examples at Bridges.

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Enter the (Paper) Matrix

Enter the (Paper) Matrix

By Glen Whitney

Glen Whitney

Executive Director, Museum of Mathematics

View more articles by Glen Whitney

Math Mondays is back from summer vacation with a brief break from all of the goodies discovered at the Bridges conference (more later) to highlight another must-visit site in the world of making with a mathematical bent. Today’s shout-out goes to PaperMatrix, an incredible compendium of all things made by weaving paper. In the mix are spheres and ellipsoids and polyhedra galore

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String art, Bridges Style

String art, Bridges Style

By Glen Whitney

Glen Whitney

Executive Director, Museum of Mathematics

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Connecting the dots between the last two installments of Math Mondays, the team got to see mathematical string art taken to a new level at this year’s Bridges conference. Here are three recent works by David Press, which lift string art off of the (card)board and into the third dimension, using families of endpoints in different planes to create ruled surfaces embedded in three dimensions.

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Math Mondays Goes to Bridges

Math Mondays Goes to Bridges

By Glen Whitney

Glen Whitney

Executive Director, Museum of Mathematics

View more articles by Glen Whitney

Last weekend, the Math Mondays crew traveled to Enschede, The Netherlands, to attend the annual Bridges conference. If you’re a serious math maker and don’t know about Bridges, you should. It’s a meeting that draws 200-400 people, all focused on the connections between mathematics and art, and the folks there create some seriously amazing objects that are often stunningly beautiful and which subsume often deep and surprising mathematical themes. Over the next several weeks Math Mondays will present a travelogue of sorts of the incredible objects — and people — you can encounter at Bridges.

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