Author: Lucie Batista

I learned about Knot Theory for a Math Forum presentation that I did and it really spiked my interest. I wanted to see if I could actually produce some knots myself to see what they looked like and how the process of tying them goes. I also wanted to see the variation in different knots…

Cubic Puzzles Explained Cubic Block Puzzles are a type of puzzle that have been around for over 100 years. According to Puzzle Maker Stewart Coffin, the earliest reference to a 3x3x3 cubic block puzzle appears in the 1893 book Puzzles Old and New by Professor Hoffman. This puzzle was named “The Diabolical Cube”, and consisted…

The Gömböc is the world’s first homogeneous, self-righting shape (it even has a Guinness World Record). First hypothesized in 1995 by the Russian mathematician Vladimir Arnold, it wasn’t until 2007 that Hungarian mathematicians Gabor Domoks and Peter Varkonyi created the first computer model, and then a physical model of a Gömböc (New York Times). What…

Cutting the coin In order to cut the coin I used fixed the coin with a vice in order for it to stay still when cutting it with the dremmel.My first attempt of cutting the coin didn’t seem very effective, as I cut across the coin not very straight as I didn’t expect as much…

For Project 0.A, we decided to create art with a simple sphericon. Sphericons are defined as shapes that are obtained by “rotating a symmetric polygon about a mirror axis to get a solid of revolution, cutting that solid into two equal pieces, and then putting the pieces back together differently” (MOMATH). For this project, we…

The Gömböc Gömböc in the Stable Equilibrium Position, Wikipedia The Gömböc is described as “the shape that shouldn’t exist”. We learned more about it by watching this Youtube video by The Action Lab, which explained that this is the only known homogenous shape to have just 2 equilibrium points; one stable and one unstable. The…