Blog
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This fall, as a creative outlet during a challenging teaching term (and as a distraction from the general mess of the world), I began posting weekly looping animations on Twitter, under the hashtag #swirlysquaresunday. The idea was to find creative expression under a tight set of aesthetic constraints: a looping animation of a black-and-white checkerboard.…
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I’m teaching a first-year programming course this fall. It’s a new online-native offering of an existing course, which I’ve been developing over the past couple of years (I hope to write more about this later). Early in the course I introduce Boolean values and conditional evaluation (we use the language Racket in this course, and…
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I’m freshly back from a weekend in Toronto, where I was participating in the Winter meeting of the Canadian Mathematical Society. I don’t normally attend math conferences, but this time around I was invited to a session entitled “The Art of Mathematics”, and it seemed natural to join in. As it happens, the session was…
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One day I was musing over Atari’s classic vector-based arcade game Tempest, and for some reason I decided it would be amusing to combine it with Tetris. The idea should have died there and then: these two games don’t belong together, and the result would a hot mess. But then I realized that the resulting…
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I first learned of Burning Man from The Happy Mutant Handbook, a book of mayhem and counterculture that called out to me one day from a bookstore shelf. I’ve never participated in the festival, and probably never will, but I know many people who have and I suppose it has accumulated a quasi-mythological status in…
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The artist M.C. Escher drew many lovely tilings, which he called “regular divisions of the plane”. He worked hard to ensure that his tilings were of lifelike animal forms such as birds and fish. He filled notebooks with hand-drawn sketches of tilings, many of which later found their way into his woodcuts. If you’d like…
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I’m thrilled to report that I’m a co-author of the article “An ultra-stable gold-coordinated protein cage displaying reversible assembly“, which was recently published in Nature. This work is the result of an exciting collaboration between biochemists, physicists, structural biologists, mathematicians, and others (including yours truly, a computer scientist!), spread over at least five countries on…
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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 symmetry sampler combines small swatches…
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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.
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Here’s the second of two new espresso cups (read about the other one). The concept is simple: slice through the bottom of the cup and the handle at an angle, so that the cup looks like it’s sinking into the table. I think I can say with some confidence that one of the direct inspirations…
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During the holidays at the end of 2017, I had a bit of time to return to my occasional hobby of 3D printing. I figured I would design a couple of new espresso cups. I always seem to come back to 3D printed porcelain cups. I suppose it’s a nice design space: the final form…
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This post is the fourth and final one in a series about Heesch numbers. Part 1 was a general introduction, and would be a good starting point if you’re unfamiliar with the topic. Part 2 covered exhaustive computations of Heesch numbers of polyominoes and polyiamonds, and likely isn’t needed to understand this final chapter. Part…