More inspiration from the terrific MoMath talk by Erik Demaine on Math and Origami: during some explorations of the one-cut problem, a student produced this, which we all agreed was beautiful.
This isn’t the only accidental paper art we discovered.
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This is a mind-blowing set of math/art projects by Daniel Walsh.
http://danielwalsh.tumblr.com/
At the right is a visualization of the magnetic field created by a small triangle of buckyball magnets.
There are only a few posts here, but they are fascinating and stunningly beautiful. I hope there are more coming!
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This is a fascinating idea: the company Bolefloor produces wooden flooring using natural, irregular boards, as seen on the right. Instead of making all the wood pieces rectangular, they simply figure out how to fit them together!
According to this article on BoingBoing, Bolefor uses sophisticated scanning, sorting, and optimizing technologies to piece together their assortment of random boards. Once the puzzle is assembled, the boards are then fitted with tongue-and-groove joints for easy installation.
An innovative idea, with beautiful results!
But how do you design an efficient algorithm that can look at all kinds of boards and see how to best fit them together? That’s a lot of irregular shapes to sort, rotate, flip, and compare!
Through Math for America, I am part of an on-going collaboration with the New York Times Learning Network. My latest contribution, a Test Yourself quiz-question, can be found here:
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/test-yourself-math-march-23-2011/
This question is based on Apple’s total profits from the sales of iPads. Selling 15 million units at 25% profit really adds up!
