29 Jul

More Life at a glance

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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21 Oct

Tetrahelix

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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03 Oct

Arches and Sangaku in Memorial Hall

Housing the largest undergraduate dining hall, a lecture hall, a student bar, classrooms, music rooms and more, Mem Hall is almost always bustling with student activity. Unlike other buildings on Harvard’s campus however, the architectural style of Annenberg Hall is unique, a fusion of New England brick with gothic arches, cathedral-like stained glass, and detail-rich ornamentation. Although a mathematical perspective can shed insight on many facets of the building, two areas of particular interest can be seen housed within the ceiling structure of the 9000-square-foot great hall. 

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03 Oct

Illuminating Angles: Preserving Artwork Through Math

Lacey Hines and Katja Diaz-Granados

In 2010, Harvard University broke ground on the three year long renovation project to merge its three art museums – The Fogg Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum – under one roof. Architects not only faced the difficult task of building a structure large enough to fit such extensive collections, but they were further constrained by curators’ unique desire to exhibit paper-based drawings and canvas paintings side by side in the same gallery.  

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03 Oct

The Behavior of Concrete Stripes and Lattices

Harvard’s new Smith Campus Center opened less than a month ago, and ever since then I’ve done most of my studying there. While the main Harvard Commons area is all brand-new wood and glass, the building’s main corridor is dominated by large, exposed concrete walls. While exiting the building one day, I noticed that these walls have a particular and peculiar design to them which consists of parallel lines and rows of holes spaced two feet apart. Below are a few pictures of the concrete that I took last week. These lines are either vertical, horizontal, or measured to be at 45 degrees.

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