Art and Math Blog

buckyball fieldThis 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!

Related Posts

Real Life Curvefitting

curvy floorboardsThis 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!

Units Matter

As someone who has long considered himself a “pure math” person, as opposed to more of a “science” person, I never really cared much about the units of expressions; kilograms, meters, Newtons, and the like.  The numbers were all I ever really cared about. Well now I see what can happen when this attitude is taken too far.

signs

It took me about 3 days of driving around Puerto Rico before I realized that speed limits were posted in miles per hour and mile markers were posted in kilometers. Driving around a foreign country (territory?) is challenging enough without having to perform a bunch of conversions in your head.

Just to further complicate matters, plenty of signs left it open to driver interpretation.

velocidad maxima

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