This post is to announce a week-long summer workshop on Illustrating Mathematics at the Park City Mathematics Institute, this upcoming July 19-23. It’s an exciting week with lots of interesting programming planned including several different hands-on, how-to tutorials, keynotes by Vernelle Noel, Ingrid Daubechies, and Daniel Piker, and mathematical “show-and-ask” sessions in which a wide… [Read more]
Materials Tools 30 equal-length rods Measuring Tape 32 rubber bands Scissors This is a sequel to a (pre-pandemic) post about weaving a stellated polyhedron. This time, I’d like to show how similar techniques can also be used to create a “great stellated dodecahedron” (“GSD” for short; illustration to the left). The materials are in fact… [Read more]
After seeing Laura Taalman’s inspiring 3d print, it occurred to me that one could also render the edge-to-edge cubical array of dodecahedra contemplated in this earlier post in an analogous way. Plus, I just received a new Prusa SL1 printer, and needed something to try it out on. So after just a bit more tinkering… [Read more]
When I showed this recent post to my friend and colleague Laura Taalman, aka mathgrrl, she suggested that another approach to creating a model of the underlying structure would be to construct the icosahedra themselves (rather than the negative space), except use wireframes of the icosahedra rather than solid ones to avoid obscuring all of… [Read more]
Judging from at least one of the previous projects, Studio Infinity is intrigued with connecting polyhedra edge-to-edge. (Of course, connecting them face-to-face is interesting, too, but that’s pretty familiar from Legos and such; and vertex-to-vertex is the same as connecting dual polyhedra face-to-face.) As you can see in the “blueprint” for the Boxtahedral Tower at… [Read more]
This MathStream post about why an icosahedron inscribes in a cube also shows that a dodecahedron fits into a cube in an analogous way. That raised the prospect that it might also be worth building an “Antidodec” analogous to the Anticos. So I quickly mocked one up in OpenSCAD (here’s the two files you need),… [Read more]
It’s high time that S∞ got back to its core: mathematical constructions you can build. Here’s an attractive star-shaped polyhedron made with a weaving technique that I am indebted to Jürgen Richter-Gebert for introducing me to. It’s called the “small stellated dodecahedron,” and is one of the Kepler-Poinsot regular polyhedra. (Unlike the usual five Platonic… [Read more]
If you’ve come here as a result of a puzzling postcard you may have come across, welcome to Studio Infinity! We hope you’ll enjoy looking at some of the other content below as well, but here are the three posts corresponding to the problems you can find on those postcards, each of which links to… [Read more]
As one of their projects, students in my class this fall wrote about something they’ve seen that sparked mathematical questions and ideas for them. The series of posts below shows the results of their work. I hope you’ll enjoy seeing math through their eyes as much as I have.
The mathematical purpose of this project is to explore the geometry of the piles that form when sand is poured on different 2D shapes. Specifically, we investigate the ridges and apexes that form on these piles. In the case of the polygonal shapes, we define a ridge as where two planes meet at a line,… [Read more]
By Sara Bobok and Do Hyun Kim Making Math Material Fall 2018 Introduction Figure 1. Harvard Stadium (Photo taken by Sara Bobok) Pivotal to community building on Harvard’s campus is the Harvard Stadium, a space for sports, theater, and school spirit. Fascinating mathematics are necessary to allow for the Stadium to fulfill these… [Read more]
Trees of Willow, True Love, and Tiling Mai Nguyen Math 168: Making Math Material I’ve been eating off these plates ever since I can remember. No matter how many beautiful or interesting pieces of dishware in our family’s house, I always gravitate towards the “Willow Plate” design. My mom told me the story of the… [Read more]