Tubing Sculpture

For a few years, I’ve been playing with tubing sculptures, like these, with the aim of illustrating symmetries of the hypersphere, described in the final chapter of The Symmetries of Things. Here are some in

Gyring Gyroid

Gyring Gyroid (w Eugene Sargent, 2012, in honor of Tom Rodgers) This piece of samurai space insect armor shows a particular mathematical surface, the gyroid, that naturally arises in many forms. Discovered by Alan Schoen,

A Woven Klein Quartic

Curvature is determined by local geometry, and this can be controlled. A pattern with a particular symmetry is often in an infinite family of patterns, all with the same underlying motif, but of varied curvature

Symmetry here and there

All of these photos were taken in 2022, for the upcoming The Magic Theorem of the Symmetries of Things, a second edition of the first part of the book, with expanded exercises and examples, in

Various crystallographic space groups

Only a few of these illustrations made it into The Symmetries of Things, but there aren’t such constraints here, and so I present a whole lot of pictures of the non-isotopic, or “composite’ crystallographic symmetries.

The Omnitruncated Dodecaplex

Assembled in one day from about 20,000 zome parts, this was a model of the omnitruncated dodecaplex, hung in Mullins Library. The model took about 200 people-hours to assemble, on November 18, 2010, coming down

Kaleidoscopes

Lots of great new symmetry stuff in the forthcoming Symmetries of Things: The Magic Theorem