Math Craft News « Math Craft

News: Have Drawn These for Years, Love Them. Have About 36 or So of Them, Thanks for Looking

News: Curvy origami designs I am working on:

I have a lot more images at hyperqbert's Profile • Instagram.

News: A 3-in-1 Model

These drawings were made with Google SketchUp. There is a dodecahedral model, icosahedral model, and a third I don't know the name of, made of rhombic faces obtained by connecting vertices of the other two. The final image is all three models together. I'll use a ShopBot CNC router to cut out the pieces this week.

News: Origami Valentine's Day Present

I made a Origami Valentine's day present for my Little Sister and Neice using heart and rose origami patterns I found on-line and put them in a backet with heart shaped lollipop I bought from Target.

News: Sierpinski Christmas Tree

This three dimensional Sierpinski tetrahedral structure was created with a lot of help from my Year 10, 12 and 13 classes. It is inspired by the Sierpinski triangle fractal.

News: Sonobe modular Fun

Made some Sonobe modules with some note cards. I made a big one with poster paper...Paper magic

News: Parabolic Art in EL-Wire by Ben Yates

This is a new line of work I've started - inspired by string art of Archimedean Lines, these are 3-dimensional sculptures made using Electro-Luminescent Wire weaved around a clear acrylic frame. They hang on the wall, but each has a sense of depth so their look alters from different angles. The EL-Wire is a copper wire coated with a phosphor so it glows its entire length, and then coated with a plastic sleeve so that it can be handled and bend around any shape.

My Drawings: And a Newfound Sense of MADNESS!!!L@L!!!

News: The Incredible Polyhedra Models of Mario Marín

Mario Marín has made an incredible collection of models and sculptures based on polyhedra, often using everyday and readily available items. The site is in Spanish, but click on the links on the left and there are plenty of photographs, and more can be seen in Mario's blog.

News: Twisted Small Stellated Dodecahedron Tensegrity

This is a zigzag tensegrity based on a small stellated dodecahedron. There are string pentagons on the outside of the model where the vertices have opened. It is made of thirty units, consisting of a barbecue stick pair with a loop of elastic. The stick pairs are all "floating", and weave through the model without contacting any other stick pairs. It is quite tricky to assemble, but can be done entirely by hand.

News: Platonic Solid Made from Rider Back Playing Cards

Below, my construction of a Platonic Solid made from playing cards. To make your own, templates can be found at George Hart's site; there are also full step-by-step instructions here.

News: DIY Fractal Gingerbreadmen

After I made a blog and sent it to my friends about how I made Gingerbreadman Map fractal holiday cookies, one of them linked me back to the Sierpinski Carpet cookies, which I loved! So, I thought I'd share my how-to with everyone as well!

News: Alexander Graham Bell's Tetrahedral Obsession

Oobject put together a neat compilation of the famous telephone inventor's love for tetrahedrons. Scroll down to see his collection of pyramids, building towers, buildings, boats, kites and planes—all made completely out of tiny tetrahedrons. Amazing.

Silver & Gold: DIY Modular Origami Christmas Ornaments

After becoming addicted to basic sonobe modular origami, I decided to make ornaments for relatives as Christmas gifts. I tried using fancy paper from stores like Paper Source, and cutting it to proper origami size, but I could never get the tight folds I wanted with non-traditional, non-origami paper. I ended up using this metallic origami paper that folds beautifully, and I'm pretty happy with the tiny models I ended up with. Forgive these pictures (iPhone/Instagram), I don't have my regular...

News: DIY Origami Christmas Tree

This is how my version of an origami Christmas tree turned out based on the instructions I posted awhile back. Cory also made a version from white glossy paper, which looks great. I opted for the green and brown look, but it wasn't easy.

News: Math Craft Inspiration of the Week: The Curve-Crease Sculptures of Erik Demaine

Erik Demaine is a Professor of Electronic Engineering and Comp Sci at MI, but he is also an origami folder who has had work displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. He makes some beautiful models and intricate puzzles, but in my opinion the really inspirational work is the curved creased models. In Erik's own words describing the above models: "Each piece in this series connects together multiple circular pieces of paper (between two and three full circles) to make a large circular ramp ...

News: DIY Papercraft Architecture with Lighting

This is probably the least "Mathy" thing I will ever post. In my opinion, it's impossible to have architecture that isn't mathematical in some sense, so I am posting it anyway. Two years ago, I made a papercraft version of a cathedral in Christchurch New Zealand (It was severely damaged in an earthquake earlier this year) and cut holes for all of the windows and lit it with LED lights. I gave it to my Mom as a Christmas gift. I thought it made for a pretty amazing "Christmas Village" piece.

News: Mathematical Knitting

Looking into mathematical quilting, I came across a community of mathematical knitters. Check out Dr. Sarah-Marie Belcastro's (research associate at Smith college and lecturer at U Mass Amherst) mathematical knitting resource page.

News: Mathematical Quilting

I got hooked on origami sometime after Math Craft admin Cory Poole posted instructions for creating modular origami, but I had to take a break to finish a quilt I've been working on for a while now. It's my first quilt, and very simple in its construction (straight up squares, that's about it), but it got me thinking about the simple geometry and how far you could take the design to reflect complex geometries. Below are a few cool examples I found online.

News: 180 Unit Sonobe Buckyball

I wondered how silly you could get with sonobe, and had a bash at a buckyball, which is a fullerene (technically a truncated isocahedron; you can see a simple model here). It's twelve pentagons—each surrounded by 5 hexagons (20 in total)—making a football shape in England or a soccer ball shape in the USA.

News: More String Art

I was browsing Reddit.com yesterday and noticed this post. User guyanonymous (yes I am really crediting him regardless of his name!) had posted up this string-art picture which has parabolic curves created from straight lines and gave me permission to post it up here on the corkboard. I love the repeating "flower" pattern.

News: Polyhedron Animation

Below, polyhedron animation test #1. The model was folded using Cory Poole's modular origami tutorial.

News: New Colour Scheme Pentakis Dodecahedron

So I really like the new colour scheme. This sonobe pentakis dodecahedron uses twelve colours; one for each face.

News: Math Craft Inspiration of the Week: The Polyhedral Metal Sculptures of Vladimir Bulatov

Vladimir Bulatov makes sculptures of fantastic variations on polyhedra and other geometric objects. His site is full of incredible metal, glass, and wooden geometric sculptures, including a full section on pendants and bracelets. Here are just a dozen or so of the hundreds of beautiful objects that he has produced.

News: Geodesic Gingerbread House

Came across this gingerbread house while browsing the web. Looks like you bake the gingerbread in hexagons and pentagons, and then "glue" them together with icing. Very cute!

News: Palm-Sized Pentakis Dodecahedron

I finally got around to making the pentakis dodecahedron from the instructions in Math Craft admin Cory Poole's blog post. It's not tightened/straightened up yet because I just noticed that I have two black and white and two blue and green compound modules next to each other (but no purple and pink modules next to each other—to the math experts, this is a parity thing, as you can only have even numbers of modules paired up next to each other).

News: M.C. Escher Square Tessellation Ornaments

Imatfaal's awesome post on Escher's tessellations on Polyhedra reminded me of some ornaments I made this summer. I made some of Escher's square tessellations onto cubes and then reprojected them onto spheres. I actually used a 60 sided Deltoidal hexecontahedron since that net is fairly easy to fold and looks pretty round.

News: Escher Tessellated Polyhedra

After Cory Poole posted some great Escher snowflakes, and Cerek Tunca had the great idea of using it as a base for a tetrahedron, well, I just had to give it a go. I will post a few more pictures and variants later (I think this was what Cerek was envisaging—if not let me know!)

News: My Snowflakes.

Snow Angels:

News: More Kirigami Snowflakes

I spent a little bit more time making 6 sided Kirigami Snowflakes using the method of this post. I'm really happy with how all of these turned out. I'd love to see other people post up some snowflakes. They're easy and a lot of fun. And I could use some more inspiration!

Mathematical Holiday Ornaments: Escher "Snow Flakes"

This week's post on creating 6-sided Kirigami Snowflakes got me interested in seeing whether I could use the process to create tessellation snowflakes using the method. I still haven't succeeded, but I did decide to make some ornaments based off a few of the tessellations by M.C. Escher that have a 6 sided symmetry.

News: Origami Sierpinski Tetrahedron Constructed with 250+ Modules

I've already posted a brief roundup of interesting models folded by Michal Kosmulski, expert orgami-ist and IT director at NetSprint. However, I didn't include my favorite model, because I felt it deserved its own post. Kosmulski folded an elaborate and large Sierpinski tetrahedron, which he deems "level 3" in difficulty. (Translation: hard). It is constructed with 128 modules and 126 links, based on Nick Robinson's trimodule.

News: My Origami Christmas Tree

Based off these instructions posted up by Justin Meyers of Scrabble World. I made it out of Glossy Photo Paper so it is really shiny.

News: Bird's Eye Maple Veneered Papercraft Dodecahedron

I bought a sheet of ultra thin 1 ply Birdseye Maple veneer the other day and decided that It would look beautiful as a dodecahedron. I used some glue to attach it to cardstock and then cut it out as the net of a dodecahedron. I used a X-acto knife to lightly etch the fold lines on both the cardstock and the veneer so that it would fold crisply. I glued it all together using superglue. This post shows the net and how to fold it.

News: Math Craft Inspiration of the Week: Christmas Chaos

If you take two flat mirrors and place them front to back and look at them, you can see an infinite number of reflections. While this is a self-replicating pattern and can be somewhat mesmerizing, it isn't anywhere as interesting as looking at the chaotic scattering of light that can occur between 3 or 4 spheres.

News: Best Math Class Project Ever

I wish there was more information about this impressively massive sonobe model, but all I can glean is that it appears to have been made by Imogen Warren, and was posted by Room 3. So awesome.

News: Nice Range of Modular Models

A source of inspiration... Models folded and photographed by Michal Kosmulski. There are only two sets of instructions on the site, but they are very well done. I wish he had covered more of the models. Here are a few I would like to tackle (I'll admit my eyes are bigger than my plate):