Math Monday: String art, Bridges Style
by Glen Whitney
Connecting the dots between the last two installments of Math Monday, the team got to see mathematical string art taken to a new level at this year’s Bridges conference. Here are three recent works by David Press, which lift string art off of the (card)board and into the third dimension, using families of endpoints in different planes to create ruled surfaces embedded in three dimensions:
“Yellow and Red Phoenix” by David Press
“Oval and Split Raceway” by David Press
“Triangle with Offset Half Circles” by David Press
Another idea that became clear at Bridges is that “string art” does not necessarily have to be about strings — there are other ways of making mathematical art out of many line segments. Here are a couple of other pieces that show that this type of work should probably be called more generally “line art:” (Note that the first one is decidedly non-planar, and was created by 3D printing in plastic; the second is executed with pins and thread on cork.)
“Hurricane Sandy” by Manuel Diaz Regueiro
“E8 polytope stringy art” by Jose L. Rodriguez
This article first appeared on Make: Online, August 12, 2013.
