Himself sent me an email the other day commenting “You could be on to something with this crochet lark especially with your infinity blanket” with this link How crochet solved an age-old maths problem – Times Online
A Latvian mathematician called Daina Taimina is using her crochet skills to “create a model of hyperbolic space”:
When she picked up her crochet hook a decade ago, Taimina had a more ambitious goal than making a scarf or hat: her aim was to create a model of hyperbolic space, a strange world where parallel lines do not stay the same distance apart but curve away from each other. It is so conceptually challenging that for a century mathematicians were unable to visualise what this type of space might actually look like. In fact, there is no formula that accurately describes hyperbolic space, so computers cannot model it either.
I would love to undertake a project like this but I must complete the infamous infinity blanket which I have been working on since May 2005. I started it when I was recuperating after my appendicitis.
Her most ambitious crochet model weighs 4.5kg (10lb) and uses 5.5km (3.5 miles) of yarn. “It is probably the largest hyperbolic crochet ever,” she says. “[Making] it was a long and painful time – it is very heavy, and so it took a lot of energy to turn it.”
Sounds just like mine! I also think that you have to be quite mathematically minded to do set-dancing because it’s all about patterns and triads and eights. I wonder is there any research about the link between dance and maths?
