Category Archives: Math Munch

Halving Fun, Self-Tiling Tile Sets, and Doodal

Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

Print out two copies of this pattern, cut them out, and fold each along the dotted lines, making two identical solids. Then fit these two pieces together to make a regular tetrahedron.

Our first bit of fun comes from a blog called Futility Closet (previously featured). It’s a neat little cut-and-fold puzzle. The shape to the right can be folded up to make a solid with 5 sides. Two of them can be combined to make a solid with only 4 sides, the regular tetrahedron. If you’d like, you can use our printable version, which has two copies on one sheet.

What do you know, I also found our second item on Futility Closet! Check out the cool family of tiles below. What do you notice?

A family of self-tiling tiles

Did you notice that the four shapes in the middle are the same as the four larger shapes on the outside? The four tiles in the middle can combine to create larger versions of themselves! They can make any and all of the original four!!

Recreational Mathematician, Lee Sallows

Naturally, I was reminded of the geomagic squares we featured a while back (more at geomagicsquares.com), and then I came to realize they were designed by the same person, the incredible Lee Sallows! (For another amazing one of Lee Sallows creations, give this incredible sentence a read.) You can also visit his website, leesallows.com.

A family of 6 self-tiling tiles

For more self-tiling tiles (and there are many more amazing sets) click here. I have to point out one more in particular. It’s like a geomagic square, but not quite. It’s just wonderful. Maybe it ought to be called a “self-tiling latin square.”

And for a final item this week, we have a powerful drawing tool. It’s a website that reminds me a lot of recursive drawing, but it’s got a different feel and some excellent features. It’s called Doodal. Basically, whatever you draw inside of the big orange frame will be copied into the blue frames. So if there’s a blue frame inside of an orange frame, that blue frame gets copied inside of itself… and then that copy gets copied… and then that copy…!!!

To start, why don’t you check out this amazing video showing off some examples of what you can create. They go fast, so it’s not really a tutorial, but it made me want to figure more things out about the program.

I like to use the “delete frame” button to start off with just one frame. It’s easier for me to understand if its simpler. You can also find instructions on the bottom. Oh, and try using the shift key when you move the blue frames. If you make something you like, save it, email it to us, and we’ll add it to our readers’ gallery.

Start doodaling!

Make something you love. Bon appetit!

$A fractal Math Munch Doodal$

A fractal Math Munch Doodal

Posted by Paul Salomon. Categories: Math Munch. Tags: Lee Sallows. 5 Comments

May. ’14

Origami Stars, Tessellation Stars, and Chaotic Stars

Welcome to this week’s star-studded Math Munch!

Modular origami stars have taken the school I teach in by storm in recent months! We love making them so much that I thought I’d share some instructional videos with you. My personal favorite is this transforming eight-pointed star. It slides between a disk with a hole the middle (great for throwing) and a gorgeous, pinwheel-like eight-pointed star. Here’s how you make one:

Another favorite is this lovely sixteen-pointed star. You can make it larger or smaller by adding or removing pieces. It’s quite impressive when completed and not that hard to make. Give it a try:

Continuing on our theme of stars, check out these beautiful star tessellations. They come from a site made by Jim McNeil featuring oh-so-many things you can do with polygons and polyhedra. On this page, Jim tells you all about tessellations, focusing on a category of tessellations called star and retrograde tessellations.

Take, for example, this beautiful star tessellation that he calls the Type 3. Jim describes how one way to make this tessellation is to replace the dodecagons in a tessellation called the 12.12.3 tessellation (shown to the left) with twelve-pointed stars. He uses the 12/5 star, which is made by connecting every fifth dot in a ring of twelve dots. Another way to make this tessellation is in the way shown above. In this tessellation, four polygons are arranged around a single point– a 12/5 star, followed by a dodecagon, followed by a 12/7 star (how is this different from a 12/5 star?), and, finally, a 12/11-gon– which is exactly the same as a dodecagon, just drawn in a different way.

I think it’s interesting that the same pattern can be constructed in different ways, and that allowing for cool shapes like stars and different ways of attaching them can open up crazy new worlds of tessellations! Maybe you’ll want to try drawing some star tessellations of your own after seeing some of these.

Finally, to finish off our week of everything stars, check out the star I made with this double pendulum simulator. What’s so cool about the double pendulum? It’s a pendulum– a weight attached to a string suspended from a point– with a second weight hung off the bottom of the first. Sounds simple, right? Well, the double pendulum actually traces a chaotic path for most sizes of the weights, lengths of the strings, and angles at which you drop them. This means that very small changes in the initial conditions cause enormous changes in the path of the pendulum, and that the path of the pendulum is not a predictable pattern.

Using the simulator, you can set the values of the weights, lengths, and angles and watch the path traced on the screen. If you select “star” under the geometric settings, the simulator will set the parameters so that the pendulum traces this beautiful star pattern. Watch what happens if you wiggle the settings just a little bit from the star parameters– you’ll hardly recognize the path. Chaos at work!

Happy star-gazing, and bon appetit!

Posted by Anna Weltman. Categories: Math Munch. Tags: applet, chaos, doodling, geometry, origami, polygons, stars, symmetry, tessellation, video. 21 Comments

Apr. ’14

Tangent Spaces, Transplant Matches, and Golyhedra

Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

You might remember our post on Tilman Zitzmann’s project called Geometry Daily. If you haven’t seen it before, go check it out now! It will help you to appreciate Lawrie Cape’s work, which both celebrates and extends the Geometry Daily project. Lawrie’s project is called Tangent Spaces. He makes Tilman’s geometry sketches move!

A box of rays, by Tilman

A box of rays, by Lawrie

Not only do Lawrie’s sketches move, they’re also interactive—you can click on them, and they’ll move in response. All kinds of great mathematical questions can come up when you set a diagram in motion. For instance, I’m wondering what moon patterns are possible to make by dragging my mouse around—and if any are impossible. What questions come up for you as you browse Tangent Spaces?

Next up, Dorry Segev and Sommer Gentry are a doctor and a mathematician. They collaborated on a new system to help sick people get kidney transplants. They are also dance partners and husband and wife. This video shares their amazing, mathematical, and very human story.

Dorry and Sommer’s work involves building graphs, kind of like the game that Paul posted about last week. Thinking about the two of them together has been fun for me. You can read more about the life-saving power of Kidney Paired Donation on optimizedmatch.com.

Last up this week, here’s some very fresh math—discovered in the last 24 hours! Joe O’Rourke is one of my favorite mathematicians. (previously) Joe recently asked whether a golyhedron exists. What’s a golyhedron? It’s the 3D version of a golygon. What’s a golygon? Glad you asked. It’s a grid polygon that has side lengths that grow one by one, from 1 up to some number. Here, a diagram will help:

The smallest golygon. It has sides of lengths 1 through 8.

A golyhedron is like this, but in 3D: a grid shape that has one face of each area from 1 up to some number. After tinkering around some with this new shape idea, Joe conjectured that no golyhedra exist. It’s kind of like coming up with the idea of a unicorn, but then deciding that there aren’t any real ones. But Joseph wasn’t sure, so he shared his golyhedron shape idea on the internet at MathOverflow. Adam P. Goucher read the post, and decided to build a golyhedron himself.

And he found one!

The first ever golyhedron, by Adam P. Goucher

Adam wrote all about the process of discovering his golyhedron in this blog post. I recommend it highly.

And the story and the math don’t stop there! New questions arise—is this the smallest golyhedron? Are there types of sequences of face sizes that can’t be constructed—for instance, what about a sequence of odd numbers? Curious and creative people, new discoveries, and new questions—that’s how math grows.

If this story was up your alley, you might enjoy checking out the story of holyhedra in this previous post.

Bon appetit!

Posted by Justin Lanier. Categories: Math Munch. Tags: applet, art, building, computers, discovery, geometry, graph theory, graphs, medicine, polyhedra, polyominoes, video. 7 Comments