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knit hilbert curve on Flickr.
I love crafting with fractals. Here’s a Hilbert curve cloth I knit using a twisted stitches technique. While the pattern was not intuitive (I had to rely heavily on the chart), it was an enjoyable technique, and I like the results.
sierpinski kerchief (by devaburger)
I crocheted a Sierpinski triangle kerchief in gold. I stopped at 4 iterations of the fractal because total area quadruples with each iteration, and I wasn’t sure I’d have enough yarn, time, or inclination to finish.
The pattern is really clever and uses the self-generating properties of the Sierpinski triangle, so after a few rows, you don’t need to look at the pattern anymore. It’s created using open chain mesh and fans, much like a triangular filet crochet.
some old hippy shawl on Flickr.
Thank you, Nerd Wars, for inspiring this colorful shawl. It’s made to illustrate the mnemonic “Some Old Hippy Caught Another Hippy Tripping On Acid,” which helps people remember the trigonometric functions.
I don’t do historical reenactment, but I need an excuse to put love into an historical costume. This. Is. It.
One of my favorite activities at the Exploratorium in San Francisco was shifting blocks to achieve maximum overhang. The result was mathematically beautiful. It’s interesting to see that the problem has been tackled again more recently & the solution makes use of random walks.
As the author of the maximum overhang paper notes, “Once one finds the classical solution, related to the harmonic series, it seems so beautiful and satisfying. It seems counterintuitive that one could do much better—that’s one source of fascination.”
(via How to draft a LeMoyne Star « Bloomin’ Workshop)
The person who drew this and posted the tutorial also commented that she is “not a math person.” I beg to differ. Compass-and-straightedge constructions and the pythagorean theorem might be high school geometry, but identifying appropriate applications for them in daily life (here, designing a quilt block) requires more than just a little mathematical insight.
Women, please stop perpetuating the “I’m so bad at math” stereotype and give yourselves some credit.
Hurricanes regularly approximate logarithmic spirals. This is meant to illustrate that Irene approximates the well-known golden spiral.
(via mattlehrer)
gambling is a tax on people who are bad at math. or a subsidy for those who are good at it.
Many patterns for crocheting or knitting doilies were published by thread manufacturers in the first part of the 20th century. The designers were often anonymous. The designs could be circular or oval starting from the center and working outward, reminiscent of the Polar coordinates system. Doilies, as well as other household items, may be made by crocheting rows on a grid pattern using a technique called filet crochet, similar to points on the Cartesian coordinate system.
book highlighting (by devaburger)
I bought this book (Ivan Peterson’s The Mathematical Tourist) second-hand, and the previous owner needs some lessons on appropriate use of highlighting.
Why would-be engineers end up as English majors
I went into college in 1998 as a promising young engineering student. I dropped engineering the same year and graduated in psychology, only to return to school in 2004 to receive my math degree. My husband and I have been discussing this phenomenon (this afternoon, even) where engineering schools say, “We need to graduate more engineers!” in the same breath as “Freshman engineering courses need to be weed-out courses!” In my case, I wasn’t weeded out by the difficulty of the material but by the culture. I was told the first day of class that I did not meet the dress code and, I kid you not, “Women should not be engineers.” I lament not fighting harder to prove them wrong.
devaburger
