HYPERBOLIC CRINKLES

Math and makers go hand in hand.

BY IVARS PETERSON

Did you think you’d find math in an unruly quilt or crinkly bead creature? No? Think again. Geometry offers all sorts of mind-bending constructions to inspire artists. Mathematician and sculptor Helaman Ferguson created a wrinkly hyperbolic quilt with four pentagons meeting at each corner. What does that mean exactly? To better understand, start by thinking of triangles. If you draw any triangle on a sheet of paper and add up its three interior angles, the result is always 180 degrees. When you draw a triangle on a saddle-shaped surface, however, the angles add up to fewer than 180 degrees. Just as a flat surface is a piece of the infinite mathematical object known as the Euclidean plane, so a saddle-shaped surface is a tiny piece of what mathematicians call the…

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Muse: The Magazine Of Science, Culture, And Smart Laughs For Kids And Children (Digital) - 1 Issue, November/December 2018

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