Here is a Cornell University press release about the crocheted hyperbolic geometry of Visiting Scholar and math department Senior Research Associate Daina Taimina. One of her specialties is mathematics education, and such creations can certainly be helpful in visualizing non-Euclidean geometries.
A similar, but even cooler, thing that this reminds me of is a crocheted Lorenz attractor made by colleagues I have seen at conferences (and met very briefly). This got a lot of attention in both the mathematics community and the popular press. I think I mentioned it in an entry before (though I couldn't find the entry just now), and at some point I may devote a full entry to it. (I know I discussed this with Tim a couple months ago, but I thought I also blogged it briefly.)
Met that woman in a outreach seminar! Do you think that the crocheted shapes help a math major? - jing
ReplyDeleteI think they're neat, but it's less clear how much they help. I would guess that they can, but one can also just use pieces of paper for educational purposes. I distinctly a math 109 problem that asked us about the properties of various geometrical objects. (The form of the question was just a chart with various properties and we had to fill in the correcy number of each property for a few different objects.) One of the objects was a Moebius strip, so I ripped out a corner of my exam (or used a blank piece of paper) and made one when I got to that question because it was just much easier to have the object in front of me.
ReplyDeleteI actually have two other incidents from Tech that were kind of similar to that. I used a racketball to help with a homework problem on parallel transport around a sphere in math 109. (Somewhere, I have a racketball with a series faded vectors on it.) On an ME 115 (robotics) test, I once found my TV antenna to be extremely useful. (It ended up having the same series of joints as described on an exam problem we had.) The professor was extremely amused by this and assured me that the exam was open-TV antenna.