Author: Kishore Rajesh

I had a great time in Math189AE this semester! I’ve learned a lot about math and making, both of which I’ll talk more about in the rest of this blog. The class was centered around five main projects, two of which are short one-week endeavors, one of which is a medium two-week endeavor, and two…

For my third project, I decided to make a pepper’s ghost illusion, which is basically a kind of “hologram” used in various special effects, most notably in Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion: What is a Pepper’s Ghost? A pepper’s ghost isn’t a real “hologram,” per se. It’s basically a reflection of light through a transparent material. Since…

by Jaanvi Chopra and Kishore Rajesh What is Tensegrity? A tensegrity structure is usually made of two pieces, one which stays flat, and another which seemingly “floats” on top. The name comes from “tension” and “integrity.” Basically, the top part is supported by the tension in the center string/chain connecting it to the bottom part…

For our project 1, we made a deck of math-themed cards and a box to house them. Designing the Cards We found an SVG file with regular cards at https://totalnonsense.com/open-source-vector-playing-cards/. We then manually edited the cards using Inkscape, an SVG editing software. Specifically, we edited the backs of the cards, the 52 main cards, and…

Introduction  Project 0.B gave us a great opportunity to learn about new technologies and mathematical concepts. We first recreated Kishore’s project, where we created Stereographic Projection Spheres. This project leveraged a mapping of a sphere onto a flat plane, and made use of 3D printers. Then, we recreated Jaanvi’s project by creating kaleidoscopes which represented…

Theoretical Harvey Mudd College Projection in Blender For our first project, we wanted to 3D print some illustrations of the stereographic projection process, in which a shape on a circle is mapped to a flat plane. This can be visualized by printing a thin shell of a sphere. If a shape is cut out correctly,…

Generative Art using Splines I’ve been interested in generative algorithms (where we start off with some basic thing and build on/modify it to make a more complex work of art via an algorithm. I did some generative music work last semester and am really interested in doing something similar with 2D art. Gradient descent is…