By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics Back in March, this column showed a 3D Hilbert curve made of 64 PVC plumbing elbows arranged in a 4x4x4 cube. Chaim Goodman-Strauss has since outdone himself with an 8x8x8 cube of 512 steel elbows that he made with Eugene Sargent: It is springy, but strong enough […]
calculus-book-cover.jpgMy buddy Trent Johnson, who works for AMD here in Austin, made this beautiful object. I was standing awkwardly in the corner at his birthday party last weekend, trying to remember how to interact with flesh-and-blood people on a face-to-face basis, when I looked down and saw it leaning against the wall next to me. And I immediately recognized it from the cover of my college calculus text, from the flyleaf of which I now quote:
By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics As announced a few weeks ago in this column, I made a large mathematical artwork at a public “sculpture barn-raising” on the National Mall in Washington DC last weekend. Hundreds of people helped me screw together these 490 laser-cut triangles into this structure which illustrates a discretization […]
By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics Here is a weaving challenge for serious makers: Can you take a single length of wire and weave it into a 3D donut surface as shown in this image? The two ends of the wire are joined with a small crimp, so it is all one continuous […]
Two methods of making geometric models from drinking straws.
Wired and others are reporting that Benoît Mandelbrot, the mathematician and father of fractal geometry, has passed away, just shy of his 86th birthday. On GeekDad, Matt Blum writes: I had the rare and amazing privilege of hearing Mandelbrot speak when he came to visit my high school about 20 years ago. Even at my […]
By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics If you take a long strip of paper, tie a simple overhand knot in it, tighten it up, and press it flat, the result is a regular pentagon. That construction is well known, and can be found, for example, in Martin Gardner’s Second Book of Mathematical Puzzles […]
