Thursday 23 April 2009

Hyperbolic Geometry via Coral Reefs, Crotchet, and Chaos....



The clever cartoon above is from the site Brown Sharpie which has loads of funny math comics. Check them out... and while you are there, after you have seen a few of the others, this is needed to condition your mind to the type of mathematical humor used... click on the calendar for the one on April 17th of this year...
It takes a while to load...but hang in there until you see it.... I admit I got impatient ...

During the same week I was introducing the conic sections in Alg II, I came across this old Ted talk about ... well, about all the stuff I mentioned above... I found it pretty interesting, and hope you will as well.

The Ted site describes it this way: "Margaret Wertheim leads a project to re-create the creatures of the coral reefs using a crochet technique invented by a mathematician -- celebrating the amazements of the reef, and deep-diving into the hyperbolic geometry underlying coral creation."


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I almost missed the April 17th joke. Thought it was a downloading glitch in my blog reader. Had my mouse on the "Delete" button, but caught on at the last minute. (Possibly related phenomenon: I make a great straight-man for my kids' jokes, too.)

Pat's Blog said...

Well, you are ahead of me, I "refreshed" twice thinking the server was locked up... then I got really emarassed.... Don't ever tell my students.
Pat