Meet Ellie, the L-shaped table.
I made her a few months ago by taking a piece of fabric and sewing the edges together like this.
Ellie is many things: a surface of genus 2, a translation surface, and a Veech surface, to name a few. On January 31, I will be leading a session at ScienceOnline called “Hands-on Math” in which people will get to make surfaces like these.
“I made Ellie because I wanted to have a touchable model of a surface that is kind of like the surfaces I study, which have these funny cone points. She is not exactly the same as my surfaces because her skin is modeled on the boring Euclidean plane rather than the sexier hyperbolic plane that I work with. But I don’t have any vast sheets of fabric made from hyperbolic crochet, and the hyperbolic surfaces wouldn’t fit into 3-dimensional space properly anyway, so Ellie is the closest thing I have.”
Read the full article at Roots of Unity.
Recent Comments