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.
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Here’s a large-scale model I designed of the Weaire-Phelan space packing, built by the participants of the Fall 2019 semester on Illustrating Mathematics at ICERM in Providence.
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Here’s a picture of FireStar, a large-scale woven small stellated dodecahedron constructed by visitors to the open house of the Institute for Computational and Experimental Mathematics during Providence, RI’s WaterFire festival on 2019 Sep 28.
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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.
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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 a solution.
Insubordinate Integral
Smallish Sequence
Troubling Triangle
And, as I’ve mentioned here before, I invite you all to submit a problem or solution to Math Horizons Playground.
A few days after the event at TCNJ, students at the PROMYS program at Boston University built another “Life sculpture” in which each layer is a generation and time proceeds downwards. Here, we explored questions of how you might know things like whether the resulting “sculpture” would be connected, or whether it would be self-supporting. For these types of questions, what one really needs is to solve the (more computationally thorny) “inverse Life” question: what colonies of cells can give rise to a given configuration in the next generation?
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Here is a photo of the first 13 generations of the evolution of the “R” pentomino pattern in John Conway’s Game of Life. Each layer represents one generation, and time proceeds downwards. In each layer, live cells are represented by boxes.
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Here’s an image from inside one of a pair of mirror-image snub dodecahedra built by passersby on the Harvard Science center plaza in 2019 April.
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Here’s a torus built from equilateral-triangle Geometiles that I used as a prop for an undergraduate talk at Harvard University in the Fall semester of 2018.
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This is a placeholder post for pictures of an installation I led on 2018 Oct 21 at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, entitled “Tetrahelix”. It consisted of a double helix, one strand of which was composed entirely of regular tetrahedra connected face-to-face (such compounds can reach any point in space and come arbitrarily close to closing in a loop but can never make a mathematically perfect loop), and the other strand of which was the combinatorial dual of the first, realized by a geometric structure that can only be thought of as a “polyhedron” in a relaxed way. When I get a chance, I will post the construction techniques and math behind this installation.
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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.
By Sara Bobok and Do Hyun Kim
Making Math Material
Fall 2018
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 functions.
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