Video on Mathematical Bead Weaving Talk G4G

I finally recorded a video of the talk I gave at the Gathering for Gardner in March, 2012.  My audience was mostly mathematicians and puzzle designers, and I created this talk with that group in mind.  I assumed that most of them had never seen bead weaving before; so I tried to make this a quick overview, showing a large range of mathematical concepts in the short time they gave me to speak.

Since there were so many speakers, the organizers gave most of us just five minutes, and they joked that you get a silver dollar for each minute under five that you used.  This video is just under six minutes, so no dollar for me.  I hope you like it.

Highly Unlikely Frame, Tetrahedron and a Video

I've been having fun making impossible objects possible.  

In this case, this frame is designed from the optical illusion shown in the line drawing here.

Like many of my pieces, this one has to be held to be fully appreciated.  The piece above is for sale in my Etsy shop.  Click on the photos to go to the listing.  

In a similar vein, here is an Unlikely Tetrahedron I made a while ago.  I don't love the colors, but I was happy to find that that the idea works.  Notice that every edge has a quarter twist in it, and every face is an "impossible" triangle.

Both of these pieces are made with cubic right angle weave (CRAW).  Here's a quick and dirty tutorial that I made on that stitch.  It's not my best work, and not really designed for beginners, but I made it in  response to a request for a tutorial on CRAW where every face has a different color.

I have a tutorial for the Highly Unlikely Triangle, which uses CRAW. 

Thanks for looking.

Hyperbolic Beaded Angle Weave No. 2

This week, I wrote about beading the hyperbolic tiling (4.5.4.5).  I mentioned that if you take a different patch of this tiling, you can get five-fold symmetry.  To show you what I meant, I beaded the piece shown here.  This time, I also used a much larger patch of the tiling; so it's a lot bigger than the first one.  This side of this pendant shows most of the beaded tiling, including the center of my patch in the center of the pendant.  

This is in contrast to my first example, where you couldn't see the center of the tiling because it was in the center of the beaded bead, on the inside.  Here is that photo again so you can compare.

This is one of the reasons that hyperbolic tilings are so different from spherical tilings, like those we usually use to make beaded beads (e.g., a beaded dodecahedron).  You can almost think of a hyperbolic plane as a sphere that's been flipped inside out.  In a spherical beaded bead, the core bead (if needed) goes on the inside, and the beaded tiling goes on the outside.  In contrast, in a hyperbolic beaded bead, the tiling goes on the inside, and the multiple core beads go on the outside.  With flat weaving, there's no core bead at all.  This all corresponds to the fact that spheres have positive curvature, flat planes have zero curvature, and hyperbolic planes have negative curvature.

If you flip this piece of beadwork over (figure 2), you can see most of the larger beads I added to stabilize the angle weave.  From this side, you can also see (almost) the entire boundary of the patch of tiles.  Do you see the ruffled edge of seed beads zigzaging between the larger beads?  Patches of hyperbolic tilings have a lot of perimeter, and if you want it to lie flat like a pendant, you have to zigzag a lot. 

I had intended the side with the big beads, figure 2, to be the front, including the big blue Swarosvki rivoli in the center, but I think I like the other side better.  In any case, the two sides are very different.  They had to be.  This piece has the symmetry of a pyramid or a flower.  The five-fold symmetry in (4.5.4.5) wouldn't allow me to make the two sides the same, even if I tried. (Correction: I could have made the two sides the same if I destroyed all of the reflection symmetries.  In that case, the finished beaded piece would have the symmetry of a barber pole.)

In figure 3,  you can see what the beaded tiling looked like before I added the larger beads and the rivoli in the center.  At this stage, it also had an unfinished edge.  It was quite floppy and uncooperative, and I had to pose it carefully for the photograph.  Smile for the camera.

In figure 4, you can see how flat the finished pendant is.  With a little doing, I was able to make the finished piece pretty flat, just 12mm thick, which is a good size for a pendant. 

You can see that I strung the cord right through the holes in the angle weave.  There were several holes to consider, and I had to try a couple to find one I liked.  I was thrilled that I could string the pendant directly onto cord because the piece I showed in my last post has no great way to hang it.  It was somewhat of a beaded bead fail, but since it was a prototype, a first try at something new, I forgive myself.  I already have a whole pile of beaded checkers, pretty little sparkly clusters with no good way to string them. Yet beaded angle weaves have built in holes big enough for cord, so as long as you don't cover them all up with the larger beads, you can use them to string the finished piece.  Nice.

More? See hyperbolic beading No. 3.

Sierpinski Tetrahedron No. 6

I made my sixth beaded Sierpinski Tetrahedron to show at the Gathering for Gardner last week, and I just listed it in my Etsy shop.  So now you can have one for your very own.  As much as anything I've ever beaded, this piece has to be held to be fully appreciated.

This beaded bead design was the inspiration for a 22 foot tall jungle gym made of bats, balls, and two tons of steel.  If you would like to learn more about this project and see more photos of the jungle gym, check out my website on Bat Country.

Hyperbolic Beaded Angle Weave (4.5.4.5)

Last week, I attended the Gathering for Gardner an event held in honor of the late, great Martin Gardner.  In case you have never heard of him, Gardner is generally considered to be the most famous recreational mathematics writer of all time.  He wrote about puzzles and games, optical illusions and magic, mathematical art, poetry, and juggling; he also wrote the definitive annotated Alice in Wonderland, and the list goes on and on.  I grew up reading many of his books. My very first quilt (using a Penrose tiling) was inspired by one of his essays.

This year I got an invitation to the Gathering.  So I eagerly traveled to Atlanta, GA to meet this wonderful community of puzzlers, mathematicians, artists, magicians and so forth, all of whom love and have been inspired by Martin Gardner's writings, just like I have.  It was my first time attending, and I gave a short talk on mathematical bead weaving.  Although I only had five minutes to speak, I presented twenty something slides across a wide gamut of mathematical concepts that I have represented with bead weaving over the years.  (Now, I'm trying to turn my five-minute talk into a four-page paper. Wish me luck.)  I didn't realize until the day after my talk that it was the largest group I've ever addressed, maybe 300 people.  Fortunately, the talk was over so quickly that I didn't have time to get nervous.

At the Gathering, a few women showed their versions of hyperbolic planes.  These included the crocheted coral reef by Margaret Wertheim, the director of the Institute for Figuring; Daina Taimina's crocheted Geometric Manifolds; and the hyperbolic bead weaving of Vi Hart, who you might know from her videos about doodling in math class.  Inspired by their work, I thought I'd take a new try at bead weaving a hyperbolic surface of my own.  To do this, I first noticed that Vi Hart's version shows an edge-only angle weave of (7^3), that is, she uses one bead on every edge of a tiling with three 7-gons around every vertex.  Her version is sparkly, and fun to fiddle with, but it's very squishy and something of a ruffled mess.  It's nice to hold, but difficult to photograph as it doesn't hold its shape. It was exactly this kind of uncontrolled ruffling that had prevented me from trying to bead hyperbolic tilings in the past.  I had seen this kind of ruffled confusion before, in such works as Helaman Ferguson's hyperbolic quilt, and I didn't give it much thought because I like my beading (and quilts) to look more organized than that.

But then I had an epiphany. You see, at the Gathering, Daina Taimina exhibited crocheted hyperbolic planes in a way I'd never seed before.  She used strategic tacking to turn a ruffled mess into an organized structure like I had done in my Dancing Fan beaded bead.  Her crochet was stiff enough to keep the whole piece from collapsing, and the tacking kept the ruffles in place.  It was easy to see the symmetry in Taimina's crochet.  I noticed this tacking immediately as I had never seen someone do that before on a crocheted hyperbolic surface.   I decided to combine Hart's idea of beading a hyperbolic tilings with strategic tacking.  Instead of tacking the edges together, however, I would use larger beads within the folds.  Also, instead of using an edge-only angle weave as Hart had done, I tried an across-edge angle weave because it would give a tighter fit and thus make stiffer beadwork.  I made a patch of the tiling below, namely the uniform hyperbolic tiling that goes by many names, including (4.5.4.5).  It has squares in yellow and pentagons in red.  I chose this one because 4 and 5 are small numbers, so the beads would fit tightly.

What you see in the first photo in this post is three views of the finished beaded bead.  Below you can see what it looked like in progress before I added the largest beads.  I show five different ways to orient my little patch of this hyperbolic tiling, but these are not all of them.  Each illustrates a different subgroups of symmetries of this patch of the tiling.   I could have used any of these as the symmetry of my beaded bead above, and I ultimately chose the one on the bottom right.  A different patch of this (4.5.4.5) tiling could also be used to show five-fold symmetries.

This little experiment made me realize that there are a lot of interesting possibilities for hyperbolic beading that are yet to be explored, an infinite number in fact.  Many infinities.  If you thought there were a lot of different polyhedra to bead, that's only because you haven't tried beading hyperbolic tilings yet.  Try it, because with infinitely many tilings to go, I know for sure that I won't have enough time to bead them all myself.

I beaded another patch of (4.5.4.5) here.