Mathematics, applications of mathematics to life in general, and my life as a mathematician.
Results for crochet
Putin became the 21st century Hitler. I call him Putler. I am an American. However, I was born in Moscow and lived my youth in the Soviet Union. I speak Russian, and I have friends in both Russia and Ukraine. The war in Ukraine is the biggest tragedy of my life. When Putler invaded Ukraine, […]
I’ve been crocheting hyperbolic surfaces of constant curvature. The process is time-consuming, so while I am crocheting, I wonder about the mathematics of crocheting. Hilbert’s theorem says that I can’t embed a hyperbolic plane in 3-dimensional space. The proof is rather involved. But here, I have an explanation from the point of view of a […]
A Whitney umbrella is a cool surface I wanted to crochet. The umbrella continues to infinity, and there is no way I want to crochet the whole thing. I wanted to make a finite portion of a Whitney umbrella surrounding the most exciting point. The result is seen in the picture. Technically, I crocheted not […]
As my readers know, I am devoted to my students. When I need something I can’t buy, I try to make it. That is why I crocheted a lot of mathematical objects. One day, I resolved to have in my possession a Seifert surface bounded by Borromean rings (a two-sided surface that has Borromean rings […]
This is my second crocheting project to help finance our new program, Yulia’s Dream, in honor of Yulia Zdanovska, a young Ukrainian math talent killed in the war. I made four Whitehead links in the colors of the Ukrainian flag. You can read about my other crocheting project in my previous post: Hyperbolic Surfaces for […]
As you might know, my team started a project, Yulia’s Dream, in honor of Yulia Zdanovska, a young Ukrainian math talent killed in the war. In this program, we will do what we are great at — help gifted youngsters pursue advanced math. To help the program, I started crocheting hyperbolic surfaces in the colors […]
Every year, after the MIT Mystery Hunt was over, I would go through all the puzzles and pick out the ones related to mathematics. This year, I didn’t feel like doing it. Besides, I think it is more important to collect quality puzzles rather than all the puzzles by topic. So my new collection is […]
I used to hate crocheting. Now it’s been growing on me. Share:
I plan to teach knot theory to my students. So, I made four blue knots which are actually the four simplest non-trivial knots. Then I made the red ones which are mirror images of the blue ones. Then I fiddled with the figure-eight knots, which are the second ones from the left. Out of all […]
I already wrote about my first experience crocheting hyperbolic surfaces. In my first surface I added two more stitches per current stitch. It took me hours to crochet the last row: the same hours it took me to crochet the rest. For my next project, I reduced the ratio. The light blue thingy has ratio […]
