(Image: George Walker/UK Reef)
Yes, it’s a crocheted coral reef. But don’t laugh. These sumptuous swirls of wool hide some serious geometry.
It all started in the mathematics department at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where Daina Taimina was studying hyperbolic geometry – a surreal world in which surfaces don’t follow the usual rules. In a flat plane, distance increases linearly as you move away from a point, but a hyperbolic plane expands exponentially. Such geometry works, but is notoriously hard to visualise.
While fragile models of hyperbolic planes had been made by gluing together repeating paper shapes, Taimina realised…
