You know who is really good at geometry? IKEA.
The efficient assemblage of triangles, rectangles, and irregular pentagons is impressive enough, but check out this clever use of an empty quarter circle!
An appropriately sized shim lets a couple of rectangles fit perfectly into that corner!
I like how this piece of playground equipment is designed to demonstrate some mathematics: the braces are color-coded by degree. For example, the blue braces are vertices of degree 6; the red braces are vertices of degree 5; and the green braces are vertices of degree 4.
The color-coding makes it easy to see the overlap of polygons here, too: around each red vertex is a pentagon, and around each blue vertex is a hexagon.
I’m pretty sure this is a bit of cheat as far as regularity goes, but it’s still a nice piece to play with!
In honor of the passing of two consecutive Isosceles Triangle Days (11/11/12 and 11/12/12), let us revisit an old favorite: which of these triangles is more equilateral?
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As a project in my Calculus course, students built sliceforms. Some of them turned out quite beautifully!
Sliceforms highlight the way we can use two-dimensional cross-sections to understand and represent surfaces in three dimensions.
You can see more examples of student sliceforms here, on my Facebook page.
