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the poetry of math
11 responses to “hyperbolic crocheted coral reef”
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Talking about beauty and the ocean :
FIRST PHOTOS: Weird Fish With Transparent Head
"With a head like a fighter-plane cockpit, a Pacific barreleye fish shows off its highly sensitive, barrel-like eyes–topped by green, orblike lenses–in a picture released today but taken in 2004.
The fish, discovered alive in the deep water off California’s central coast by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), is the first specimen of its kind to be found with its soft transparent dome intact.
The beady bits on the front of the Pacific barreleye fish in this picture released February 23, 2009, aren’t eyes but smell organs.
The grayish, barrel-like eyes are beneath the green domes, which may filter light. In this picture the eyes are pointing upward–the better to see prey above in the darkness of the barreleye’s deep-sea home. "
Thanks to msamaclean for the discovery =)
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This is a really great picture! The real mystery lies within the edges of the frame where other people, objects and lighting are partially visible. This is similar to images/compositions captured in the depths of the ocean where the subject (reef) is usually in full view and very interesting, but just beyond the frame is the vast ocean where schools of jellyfish, sharks, barracuda, other divers, sunlight/darkness and other natural and artificial objects clip the frame telling an incomplete story, but hint at drama on a larger stage.
The crocheted coral reef is very clever. Your picture of the reef is very poetic.
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and some of the back story from the project site:
"most mathematicians had believed it was impossible to construct physical models of hyperbolic forms, yet nature had been doing just that for hundreds of millions of years. It turns out that many marine organisms embody hyperbolic geometry, among them kelps, corals, sponges and nudibranchs. The IFF reef not only looks like an actual coral reef, it draws on the same underlying geometry endemic in the oceanic realm. There is a very good reason why marine organisms take on hyperbolic forms: this geometry realizes surfaces with maximal area in a limited volume thus providing enhanced opportunity for filter feeding by sessile (or stationary) creatures."
And the construction method reminds me of Wolframs cellular atomata, but in 3D.
"Over the past two years, through increasingly freeform experimentation, we have discovered that tiny changes in the underlying crochet algorithms will result in major changes to the resulting forms. By exploiting this insight we have gradually evolved a wide taxonomy of hyperbolic crochet “species.” To our surprise, the range of possible forms seems to be endless, yet they all result from extremely simple instruction sets. Just as the teeming variety of living species on earth result from different versions of the DNA-based genetic code, so too a huge range of crochet hyperbolic species have been brought into being through minor modifications to the underlying code. As time progresses the models have “evolved” from the simple purity of Dr Taimina’s mathematically precise algorithms to more complex aberrations that invoke ever more naturalistic forms."
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This is simply fabulous. I just discovered embroidery, though, and that’s a sufficient time sink. Must … not … look … at … this … anymore….
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The talk went online for anyone interesting.
Fascinating indeed !
Did you try "crochet" them ?
=)TED Talk – Margaret Wertheim: The beautiful math that links coral, crochet and hyperbolic geometry
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