Continuing a Math Mondays tradition of building Sierpinski triangles and tetrahedra out of various materials, today we’re going to do it with mailing tubes. The basic unit requires six identical mailing tubes and a piece of cord or twine about 8.5 times as long as the tubes.
Here’s a project we did a long time ago in collaboration with Vi Hart, that somehow never made it into Math Mondays. The idea is simple: lay out pennies on a large horizontal surface, such as a floor, in the pattern of a Sierpinski triangle. How many? Well, the basic triangle with a one-penny size hole
From the Museum of Mathematics The Math Mondays Experimental Making Labs recently received numerous binder rings in its Incoming Raw Materials box. You know — the little circles that clip closed, used to hold a sheaf of hole-punched paper together. According to the donor: “Here’s an office supply item that you’ve never used on Math […]
A detailed, step-by-step illustration of how to make a tensegrity structure that you may not find in a lot of other places — a frustum of a pentagonal pyramid.
The Museum of Mathematics’ Glen Whitney shows you how to build an octahedron and more with light sticks, rubber bands, and paper fasteners.
For the Museum of Mathematics Last column, we saw some of the basics of modular origami with the Sonobe unit. Today’s post is mostly a gallery of a few of the limitless cool things you can do with this unit. But first, a note about chirality. A three-dimensional object is chiral if it cannot be […]
There have been numerous installments of Math Monday on origami or kirigami of one mathematical form or another, but today is the first time we’ve covered a classic workhorse from this genre: the Sonobe modular origami unit. One of the simplest and most versatile of the modular units, there’s so much to say about Sonobe that today we’re going to start from the basics (parallelogram one?) and next time we’ll take it to places I hope you’ve never seen it go before.
