Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

Gemelli, by Sander Huisman

How much do you like pasta?  Well, these mathematicians and scientists from around the world like pasta so much that they’ve been studying its shape mathematically!  Check out this New York Times article about Sander Huisman, a graduate student in physics from the Netherlands, and Marco Guarnieri and George L. Legendre, two architects from London, who have all taken up making graphs of and equations for pasta shapes.  Sander posts his pasta-graphs on his blog.  Legendre wrote this book about math and pasta, called Pasta By Design.  Legendre has even invented a new type of pasta, shaped like a Mobius strip (see last week’s Math Munch for lots of cool things with Mobius strips), which he named after his baby daughter, Ioli!

Some of Legendre’s pasta plots

Next, here comes the flowsnake.  Wait – don’t run away!  The flowsnake is not a terrifying monster, despite it’s ominous name.  It is a space-filing curve, meaning that the complete curve covers every single point in a part of two-dimensional space.  So if you were to try to draw a flowsnake on a piece of paper, you wouldn’t be able to see any white when you were done.  It’s named flowsnake because it resembles a snowflake.

The flowsnake curve

A single piece of the flowsnake curve.

Units of flowsnake fit together like puzzle pieces to fill the plane

Finally, check out this awesome online symmetry-sketcher, called Symmetry Artist!  Here, you can make doodles of all kinds and then choose how you want to reflect and rotate them.  Fun!

Bon appetit!