Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Margaret Wertheim

Margaret Wertheim is one of the founders of the Institute for Figuring.
Here's a short note from their site,

"The Institute For Figuring is an educational organization dedicated to enhancing the public understanding of figures and figuring techniques. From the physics of snowflakes and the hyperbolic geometry of sea slugs, to the mathematics of paper folding and graphical models of the human mind, the Institute takes as its purview a complex ecology of figuring."


The Institute for Figuring website


I believe that I've encountered her work before, but what compelled me to blog about her that the fact that I've been on the search for creative crossovers with science. Her project of crocheting a coral reef is a great example. It's as she puts it; a feminist perspective, environmental activism, and also a mathematical theorum put to the test. Hyperbolic geometry was proven by crocheting. Here's a great TED talk about it.

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