calculus-book-cover.jpgMy buddy Trent Johnson, who works for AMD here in Austin, made this beautiful object. I was standing awkwardly in the corner at his birthday party last weekend, trying to remember how to interact with flesh-and-blood people on a face-to-face basis, when I looked down and saw it leaning against the wall next to me. And I immediately recognized it from the cover of my college calculus text, from the flyleaf of which I now quote:
Apart from the fact that the bricks and plates are open at their bottoms, and so the pieces always have one side that can’t be “smooth,” Lego is a pretty handy way to prototype interlocking solid puzzles. Many of these are based on cubic units, and can be built in Lego at a scale of 1 cube = 2 studs x 2 studs x 5 plates.
Eric Harshbarger, whose Lego hijinks we’ve featured a couple times before, has produced some lovely models based on this principle. Shown above are his 6-piece burr, checkered solid pentominoes, Soma cube, and deluxe polycube set. The awesomeness continues at Eric’s site.
Ron Doerfler of Rolling Meadows, IL is an engineer for Northrop-Grumman. He’s written a book on advanced mentat techniques and keeps a fascinating blog called Dead Reckonings: Lost Art in the Mathematical Sciences:
Part of this problem, posed by one Ernst Straus in 1952, is to design a polygonal room lined with mirrors having at least two points such that any ray starting at one point can reflect around the room forever without hitting the other point, and vice versa. One such room, shown above, was demonstrated by […]
I was drawing birds this weekend and thought I’d give a shout out to American illustrator Charley Harper (1922-2007). Harper is best known for his highly stylized nature drawings, full of elegant geometry and bold portions of color that capture the remarkable personalities of so many feathered friends. When asked to describe his visual style, […]
As a female who LOVES browsing the make.com materials, and who is courageous but sometimes missing some of the physics, I would love a basic (but thorough) explanation about the physics of trusses and how they distribute the load of the roof.
By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics What cool things have you made with magnets lately? Anything like the above dodecahedral construction? These geometric sculptures are the creations that resulted from Robert Hodgin playing with thousands of small magnetic spheres and cylinders. I especially like his geometric forms which remind me of Ernst Haeckel’s […]
