Life – Page 4 – Andrea Hawksley

October 20, 2014November 21, 2014

The Celebration of Mind

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. 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.

Admittedly, I’m a bit late to the advertising, since some of the CoM events have already happened, but there are still plenty more to go (the 100th anniversary of Martin Gardner’s birth isn’t until tomorrow!).

Last weekend, I went to the Stanford CoM event and listened to some fun talks about an assortment of Martin Gardner related things. For example, Donald Knuth talked about Martin Gardner and the number 100 in honor of Martin’s 100th birthday. For the second half of the event, I ran a workshop where we did modular origami with business cards. There were a bunch of other neat workshop type things going on at the same time, but I’m afraid that I had to miss all of them.

This was my first time doing a business card origami workshop on the west coast and I was surprised how few people had done business card origami before. On the East coast, business card origami has evangelists like Jeannine Mosely, *the* master of business card origami. So I assume that most people interested in math art will have seen it before. But, apparently that is not so much the case on the west coast. It was fun being people’s first introduction to the idea. I had people commenting that they “finally knew what to do with their old business cards” or that they “needed to redesign their business cards to work better when folded up”.

I taught the smaller kids the standard six card cube (originally designed by ???, certainly rediscovered many times due to simplicity). Some of the adults entertained themselves by reverse engineering models that I had brought to show off. I also taught several people the module used to create a rhombicuboctahedron (a design that I discovered on my own, although, again, it would be far from shocking of someone else had made it first. Although, interestingly, I haven’t seen it anywhere else myself, so…).

If you want to check out a similar event in your area, you can search for one on the official CoM page.

By the way, if you’re in the Bay Area and are sad about having already missing out on this event, then you’re in luck. There is another CoM in Berkeley on the 26th, so you get a free second chance to check it out for yourself!

October 20, 2014November 21, 2014

eleVR

When I first started this blog, it was really just a generic medium to share what I’ve been doing with my life. As it’s progressed it’s turned into more and more of a mathematical art and recreational math focused blog, which is awesome, but means that it no longer feels like a great place to share my random vacation photos, non-mathy artistic endeavors, and other fun projects.

For example, virtual reality.

See, a few months ago, I got a surprise phone call from my friend Vi.

“Have you tried the Oculus?”

Vi makes videos and, after trying the Oculus, she suddenly felt incredibly limited by the rectangularity of the medium. VR video is the future of video, and she wanted to get in ahead of the curve. Did I want to join?

Together with Emily Eifler, the three of us have been thinking about, experimenting with, and creating live action virtual reality videos – all while sharing our insights and results on the web. We’ve named our research project eleVR, and I think that a number of the readers of my blog here might be interested in the fun, thoughtful, and often quite mathematical things that we talk about there.

I’m probably not going to talk much more about eleVR stuff here. So, if you want to learn about the future of video in probably the most math-y art-y way possible (Did I mention that the eleVR team includes both me and Vi Hart?), then you should definitely follow us at elevr.com.

September 23, 2014January 23, 2024

The International Congress of Mathematicians

If you are involved in the mathematics community, you’ve probably heard of the International Congress of Mathematicians. In addition to being the largest gathering of professional mathematicians in the world, it’s also the place where the Fields Medals, often considered to be the greatest prize in mathematics, are awarded by the International Mathematical Union.

The ICM, like 6OSME, is held only once every 4 years. This year, it was held in Seoul at the same time as the Bridges Math Art Conference (the subject of my last post), for reasons that were, of course, entirely non-accidental.

As a fairly active participant in Bridges, I didn’t spend as much time at the ICM as it deserved, but I did make it there for a few talks.

August 21, 2014August 6, 2015

Bridges Math Art 2014

It’s conference season, and I just concluded a week in Korea at the Bridges Math Art conference. This was my third time there, although my previous blogging of it has been minimal. Bridges is *the* conference for people interested in mathematical art, and the diversity of work that is shown and presented there is incredibly impressive.

This year I presented a workshop on Binary Dance, which, by participant request, was spontaneously renamed the “Binary Dance Party” to make it more “fun”. I certainly had fun moving around, trading partners, stomping, clapping, and performing assorted binary operations. So much fun, in fact, that I forgot to take pictures. Oops! You can find the full paper on the Bridges archive.

I also showed my origami star polyhedra in the juried art exhibit, helped jury the short movie festival (go watch some of these now!), and acted in the play. By the way, the play, “Scrambled Legs and Bacon”, was a world premiere written by Steve Kennedy and directed by Steve Abbott, both regular Bridges attendees. I played a female graduate student who seemed to spend most of her time solving logic puzzles.

As you can already tell just from the things that I personally had a hand in, Bridges really puts an effort into being about all kinds of math, all kinds of art, and all sorts of connections between them. In addition to the events that I’ve mentioned, there was a mathematical poetry night, a math dance performance by Karl Schaffer, Erik Stern, and Saki, and a few large construction “barn raisings”.

Given my fondness for the 120-cell, it’s no surprise that I was a fan of this giant Zometool omni-truncated 120-cell that was constructed on site, mostly by some highly motivated high school students.

Another highlight of the conference was seeing Noam Elkies and listening to him give his talk on Canons. If you ever get a chance to see Noam Elkies talk about music you absolutely need to go. People were buzzing about his talk for days.

Unlike 6OSME, where the exhibition is supplementary to the accepted papers and presentations, the Bridges exhibition mostly showcases artwork for which there is no presentation (and vice versa). Indeed, at Bridges, the artwork and the papers are juried/refereed separately. However, a few of the talks did match up with pieces in the art exhibition.

For example, Carlo Séquin talked about his lego-compatible 3D printed curvy construction pieces and also showed examples of them in the exhibit.

Similarly, Henry Segerman talked about his paper with Vi Hart on creating a physical visualization of the quaternion group, and showed the resulting monkey sculpture in the exhibit.

Of course, just like 6OSME, way more awesome things happen at Bridges than I can describe in one blog post. Fortunately, everything is well documented and publicly available, so you easily read the papers, view the art exhibition, and watch the film festival from your computer at home. And, if Bridges seems like your sort of thing, then I look forward to potentially meeting you next year at Bridges 2015 in Baltimore, Maryland.

Finally, oh my gosh, tessellating bunny snub cube!

August 12, 2014August 17, 2014

6OSME

I spent the last week in Tokyo, Japan attending the 6th meeting on Origami, Science, Math, and Education (6OSME).

6OSME is an amazing gathering of researchers from all of the many disciplines relating to origami (computer science, mathematics, engineering, architecture, etc.), as well as serious origami artists. If you’ve ever doubted the validity of origami as a serious research discipline, then hearing a few talks here will surely change your mind. And if you think of origami as paper cranes made from a single folded square with no cuts, then the topics of these presentations might surprise you. There were way too many presentations for me to cover all of them, but here are a few of the topics that were covered to give you a sense of the breadth of origami research.

On the industrial engineering side, Gregory Epps kicked off the convention with a plenary talk on “Industrial Robotic Origami”, or the production of curved, folded metal by robots. Robots folding metal. ’nuff said.

Mathematicians like to imagine that the world is made up of “ideal” paper, which is entirely rigid, bends only at fold lines and has no stretch. It’s also infinitely thin, of course. In this theoretical world, it turns out that you cannot squash paper polyhedra flat. You might have trouble achieving this world in practice, though – most paper is actually a bit stretchy. Abel, Connelly, Demaine, Demaine, Hull, Lubiw, and Tachi showed that by adding small slits it is possible to fold polyhedra flat in their work on “Rigid Flattening of Polyhedra with Slits”.

Most people don’t think of origami as involving cuts, but 6OSME actually had an entire session devoted to “pop-up” techniques. Yoshinobu Miyamoto showed off some impressively tall and sturdy structures made from single sheets in his presentation on “Rotational erection system (RES): origami extended with cuts”. The tallest one that he demonstrated looked to be about 4 feet tall, and it seemed clear that they could get way bigger with the correct materials.

Chris Itoh managed to pull the biological sciences into the conference with his talk on “The elusive technique of folding anatomical subjects”.

This talk on “Curved-folding convex polyhedra through smoothing” was from a highly architectural point of view. Suryansh Chandra, Shajay Bhooshan, and Mustafa El Sayed work in the research branch of an architectural firm, where they developed this technique so as to be able to create cool, “real-world” structures.

My own work was presented in the “modulars” session on origami made from multiple sheets of paper. I spoke on my star polyhedra series and the design process that I use to create these highly mathematical models.

The variety of origami sciences represented at OSME is amazingly impressive, and I don’t have the space to do it justice. I am missing a bunch of fantastic talks just because I was focusing more on breadth than on depth, but I haven’t even covered the full breadth here. You’ll have to check out the full papers (when they come out) to get the scoop.

OSME is held only once every four years, so if you want to attend the next one you will have to wait for a while. On the other hand, you’ll have plenty of time to prepare your presentation!