The last several years have been odd and isolating. I know that it has been very stressful for me and for most people that I have been in any level of contact with (which, since the start of the pandemic has been markedly less for all of my friends…I’m sorry that I have been missing from your lives – I still like you and want to be your friend!). Since humor can be an effective way to reduce stress, I hope that this particular project makes you smile.
A recent project of mine that I will be presenting at the 2022 Bridges Math Art conference is all about mathematical puns.
Puns are a good way to introduce complicated concepts in a non-intimidating manner. I have previously used them in various math art projects including the hyperbolic airplane skirt and the parrotohedron.
The Hyperbolic Airplane SkirtThe Parrotahedron
Today, I am sharing some visual math puns created using stuffed (polyester-filled) animals. The resulting sculptural poly-fill-hedra are simultaneously attractive art pieces and entertaining math puns. I write quite a lot more about these creations in my Bridges short paper, which I will link to here when it is officially published later this year.
The dodocahedron. 12 stuffed dodos arranged into a rhombic dodecahedral shape.The Otterhedron, a -hedron made out of eight (octo) otters.
The Tetrahedron, made out of four (tetra) neon tetras.
A few years ago, I wrote about participating in a Celebration of Mind event at Stanford.
For those that need a reminder, The Celebration of Mind (CoM) is like a series of mini-Gathering for Gardner‘s that happens all over the world around the anniversary of Martin Gardner’s birth.
This year, I am pleased to once again be presenting at the Stanford Celebration of Mind today. I will be talking about visual cryptography and doing a re-hash of the business card origami workshop.
If G4G has always looked like fun to you but you haven’t been able to go, I really encourage you to attend a Celebration of Mind. You can find similar events in your area, you can search for one on the official CoM page.
My gift for Gathering For Gardner 12 was a set of 12 specially marked business cards that can be used to assemble a rhombicuboctahedron. The final construction looks like this:
Apologies for the cracking when folded – I’ve never purchased business cards before and wasn’t clear about what options you needed to choose to get “optimal for folding” cards.
I first came up with this design a few years ago after I was handed a large pile of old business cards and gave myself the challenge of creating modular origami models of all of the Archimedean solids. As I noted in my post at the time, “I wouldn’t be surprised if some (or even all) of these designs were examples of parallel invention, but I haven’t seen any of them elsewhere as yet, and I certainly had a fun time coming up with and building them, which is probably the important part”.
It is possible to put this together without tape or glue, but it isn’t super easy. You may find it easier to add temporary or permanent tape as you go if you don’t mind “cheating”.
If you want to treat this construction as a puzzle, you should probably stop reading here.
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How to make your own business card rhombicuboctahedron
Fold all 12 cards as indicated. (If you want to use unmarked cards, see folding directions at bottom)
Groups of three cards go together like this
Groups of four cards go together like this
If you are trying to make this without tape or glue assistance, I recommend starting with a group of four cards held in your non-dominant hand
Add cards around as in the next several images
The last piece is the most difficult to add (you might have to force it a bit), but the entire structure should stay together once it has been added
Don’t forget to put your pieces together in a nice color scheme!
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Folding modules from arbitrary cards (Pictorial Instructions)
These instructions show the easy way to fold modules. These modules are not centered, but the technique for centering the module if necessary to match with the card design should be straightforward.
Hypernom is a 4D VR game that I’ve been working on with Vi Hart, Henry Segerman, and Marc ten Bosch. We’ve already talked about it on the eleVR blog. You can see the code on Github, read about the math behind the game in our paper, and see our presentation about it at Bridges 2015 in flat and spherical video … amongstotherthings. So I thought I would try something a bit different in my blog post…
I work in a group that makes things for the pretend world that you wear on your head. We just made a game where you eat four-world things, one three-world thing at a time. My favorite thing to eat is made up of my favorite three-world thing.
My favorite thing in the three-world is made from ten and two faces with five sides each that are put together.
My favorite three-world thing is like a different three-world thing with twenty faces with three sides each that are put together. The points of my thing are like the faces of the other thing and the faces of my thing are like the points of the other thing. Both things have ten times six edges and share a group with 10 times six times two parts. Notice that 10 times six times two is also five times (ten and two) times two and three times twenty times two.
If you get a hundred and twenty of my favorite three-world things put together then you have another of my favorite things. It does not fit in the three-world and instead lives in the four world. In the fun game that we wrote, you can eat all hundred and twenty of my favorite three world things by moving your head around.
Yuri Vishnevsky, Kelly Delp, Katie, and I make a human cube at Bridges 2015
Conference season is exhausting, so I’m very selective about which conferences I attend. Bridges Math Art is definitely one of my favorites and has a solid spot on my “attend” list every year.
The 2015 conference just ended, and was as amazing and exhausting as ever.
This year I presented a workshop on Fibonacci Lemonade (and other mathy layered lemonade variants). Even though Bridges is all about the junctions between math and art, the art of cooking is rarely represented. The Fibonacci Lemonade workshop diversified the conference a bit with some delicious summer math fun. You can find the full paper on the Bridges archive.
My big projects for this year’s Bridges were a couple of 4-dimensional VR art projects that were made jointly with Vi Hart, Henry Segerman, Will Segerman (monkeys only), and Marc ten Bosch. “Monkey See, Monkey Do” is a project with both 3D printed and VR monkeys arranged symmetrically in 4D space and displayed in the juried art exhibit.
“Hypernom” is a sort of 4-dimensional Pacman, where you move your head around and try to “eat” the cells. We showed this in the art exhibit and also had a paper and presentation on some of the math behind the project: “Hypernom: Mapping VR Headset Orientation to S3“.
We’ve been working on these projects for a while and I’m delighted with how they turned out. Look out for upcoming blog posts about these pieces – they deserve to have more said about them than what I can fit in one paragraph in a conference summary post. (Update: Vi just made a post about Hypernom on eleVR.com – go check it out)
I also acted in the play, co-wrote mathy-y lyrics to Hotel California (“Hotel Hilbert”), served on the proceedings program committee, and helped jury the short movie festival. (I know, I know, I could do more conferences with less exhaustion if I just did less stuff when I went to one) Needless to say, it was a pretty hectic conference, and I definitely didn’t get to check out every presentation and workshop that I was interested in.
I did get to see the math dance performance by Karl Schaffer, Laurel Shastri, and Saki, as well as Tanya and Tim Chartier’s mime act. Both groups had some new work that I hadn’t seen before and thoroughly enjoyed.
This year’s art exhibit was quite possibly the most impressive exhibition in the whole time that I’ve been attending Bridges.
Within the mathematical theme that connects the pieces of the exhibit there is a great deal of variation both in terms of medium and focus. Here are six pieces that show some of the depth and variety of the exhibition.
