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Math Craft News

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News: Fractal Pecan Pie

Following the pattern of fractal goodies, I found this great article on making a giant fractal pecan pie. Seems like you'll need some dedicated pecan pie enthusiasts (shouldn't be hard to find) to help you out!

News: Origami Panda

So, this is a type of origami that is called golden venture origami. This type of origami is made of hundreds to thousands of little intersecting triangles. This took about 2-3 three hours, the picture is pretty bad because it was taken at school with a cell camera. But I hope this inspires you to make some of your own! This type of origami is in essence very easy to make but takes a lot of time and effort to make. However if you get really good at it, you can do it without even looking at ab...

News: Orderly Tangle Earrings

I decided I would make those earrings I alluded to in Monday's Post on orderly tangles. I had to shrink the templates down so that the triangles are about 2 cm on a side. I used 110 lb cardstock and and painted them using metallic leafing paint in gold, silver, copper, and brass. I would put up a tutorial, except I think that this project would be too frustrating for most people. All I can suggest is that you make the orderly tangle of 4 triangles multiple times and just keep shrinking the si...

News: Tom Friedman's Twisted Math Art

Tom Friedman is one of my favorite artists. He's got a great sense of humor, and his work is meticulous and beautiful. He forays into Math Art, and from a partisan perspective, he seems to be inspired by mathematics, but the end results are more of a whimsical twist than a mathematically "correct" execution. But I could be totally wrong. Comment below and fill me in.

News: Modular Origami

Cory has posted some great picture of Father Magnus' intersecting cubes (the great man is holding one in his right hand) - well the above is what happens when five tetrahedra intersect. It is modular origami and made from just ten sheets of origami paper. technically in a folding sense it is easy - but putting it together is mind-warping

Math Craft Monday: Community Submissions (Plus Polyhedral Stellation)

It's another Monday, which means it's once again time to highlight some of the recent community submissions posted to the Math Craft corkboard. Additionally, I thought we'd take a look at the process of stellation and make some stellated polyhedra out of paper.Rachel Mansur of Giveaway Tuesdays posted a video from animator Cyriak Harris, which zooms into fractal hands, where each fingertip also has a hand and fingers. A few more details can be found here, as well as some other really cool pic...

News: Math Craft Inspiration of the Week: Electrically Generated Fractal Branching Patterns

Natural processes often create objects that have a fractal quality. Fractal branching patterns occur in plants, blood vessel networks, rivers, fault lines, and in several electrical phenomena. Many of these processes take lifetimes, or even occur on geological timescales. But this is not the case for electrical phenomena. They often occur near instantaneously. One example would be the branching patterns that sometimes occur in lightning.

News: Rotating Mirror Stellated Octahedron

The initial idea for this project was to use magnets in the tips of the stellated octahedron and the intersections of the metal rings for either suspension or even a sort of weightless rotation. This turned out to be a bit too ambitious considering I'm working with found mirror and hot glue. So instead, I scrapped the magnets and went with simply mounting it on a skateboard bearing so it can freely rotate and not be bound to the base.

News: Cyriak Harris' Fractal Freakiness

I'm sure many of you have already seen this, but being Halloween and mathematically inspired, I thought I'd dig up an old favorite for those who may have missed it. Original post with quote from Cyriak here. More fractal hands: Tim Hawkinson's "Fruit" Series

News: Math Craft Inspiration of the Week: The Kinetic Wave Sculptures of Reuben Margolin

Reuben Margolin builds large scale kinetic sculptures based off of mechanical waves. Some of his sculptures contain hundreds of pulleys all working in harmony with each other to create sinusoidal waves and their resulting interference patterns. He designs them all on paper and does all of the complicated trigonometric calculations by hand. Everything is mechanical; there are no electronic controllers.

A Kit-of-No-Parts: "Crafting" Electronics at MIT

I recently came across this amazing MIT media lab site, Kit-of-No-Parts. Though not directly related to the content Cory has been posting, it is an interesting "craft" approach to technology/science. The site was created as documentation of a student's thesis work in the High-Low Tech research group at the MIT Media Lab:

News: Math Craft Inspiration of the Week: The Curved Geometric Paper Sculptures of Richard Sweeney

Richard Sweeney is an incredible artist whose body of work consists mainly of sculptures made from paper. His art is often related to origami, and much of his work is related to geometrical forms. I personally really love his modular forms in paper. Many of them are based off of the platonic solids, which have been discussed in previous posts this week. Below are a small number of his sculptures, which are very geometric in nature.