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Research

Hexagonal Cross Stitch

At least year’s Bridges Conference in Stockholm, I attended a short presentation by Susan Goldstine about “self-diagramming lace”. As motivation for the new work she was presenting, Susan referenced her paper from the year before on what she calls “symmetry samplers”. Samplers are an old tradition in fibre arts. A …

The Tactile libraries

I developed a new open-source software library for manipulating isohedral tilings, based on the work I did on this topic during my PhD. The library is available in C++ and Javascript, and I offer a few fun automated and interactive demo programs that anybody can use to play with isohedral tilings.

Heesch Numbers, Part 2: Polyforms

In the first post in this series, I introduced the concept of a shape’s Heesch number. In brief, if a shape doesn’t tile the plane, its Heesch number is a measure of the maximum number of times you can surround the shape with layers of copies of itself. (Shapes that do …

Heesch numbers, Part 1

I love tiling theory. It’s a branch of mathematics that brings together many beautiful ideas, and that offers a lot of open questions for exploration. And of course, it gives us tools to apply mathematics in the world of art and design. Normally, in my research as a computer scientist …

A new near miss

The photo above is a paper model of a polyhedron that I just assembled. The model consists of four dodecagons (12-sided regular polygons) and 12 decagons (10-sided regular polygons). The holes are 28 equilateral triangles that in theory could be filled with more paper. This polyhedron has a few symmetries, …

Seeking test images for comic research

Hi, my name is Craig Kaplan.  I’m a Computer Science professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada. I’m using my blog as a convenient place to put out a call to comic artists for test images that we could use in our research. My PhD student Matthew Thorne is working on software …