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The Gathering for Gardner 10

was held at the end of March 2012. I had a really great time there, and, in addition to meeting lots of amazing people, learning a bunch of cool things, and seeing some astounding close up magic, also had the opportunity to put together a bunch of fun sculptures. Here are the three biggest projects that I contributed to.

This slide-together is my own design, based off of a pentagonal hexecontahedron. Zachary Abel and Brett Wines helped with construction.
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This pen and rubber band structure, dubbed the “Ritz Icosidodecarlton” was a joint project with Zachary Abel, Lucas Garron, Brett Wines, Alex Fink, and Sai. Vi Hart also supplied some artistic input.
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Finally, this giant rubber band structure with the balloons (based off of a snub cube with “tendrils”) was designed by Zachary Abel and put together by a large group people (I didn’t all the names).
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The Chaka Stata

was an exercise in building an Incan rope bridge in as traditional a manner as possible. My classmates and I spent much of our Spring 2007 term twisting twine into two-ply cords and cords into thick ropes. Fortunately, the end result was beautiful and well worth it. It was also covered pretty thoroughly by the press. The MIT spotlight on it, with links to various articles about our bridge, can be seen here:  http://www.mit.edu/spotlight/inca-bridge/

The images here were taken by Christine Espino

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The USS Sharkette

was built by Paul Csonka, Kseniya Charova, Cameron Schaeffer, Jane Huang, and me in April 2011. The photos here were taken by Paul Csonka and Lewis Hom.

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Binder Clip Sculptures

My friend Zach Abel has come up with an impressive assortment of binder clip sculptures. I love the idea of taking everyday objects and turning them into amazing things, so I felt compelled to try making some of my own.

I used the join that Zach uses for his Clipped Corners to create a cuboctahedron (my favorite Archimedean solid!).
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I then added some extra binder clip handles to add points and accentuate the octahedral symmetries. Somewhat surprisingly, these extra handles can slot into place and from quite a rigid sculpture. Some of Zach’s sculptures use fewer handles than clips, now there is a way to make use of all of those excess handles!
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It turns out that you can get binder clips in many colors, so it seemed obvious that some of the sculptures should show off the symmetric colorings associated with their symmetry groups. The Icosahedral group has a nice five-coloring and a nice six-coloring. I used miniature binder clips to create this five-colored version of Zach’s Clipped Corners sculpture. Perhaps I will eventually make a six-colored version sometime to round out the set.
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