By Louisa Burden

Editor in Chief

Trying to graph a three dimensional function in Maple or Matlab can practically drive you insane. But never fear – there may be a “craftier” way to do it. Just graph your equation the way Daina Taimina does – by breaking out the yarn and the crochet needle!

Taimina, a math professor at Cornell University, has been using her crocheting skills for years to give a visual, physical representation of what various functions might look like. The finished products look like bands of crocheted rows that swirl around and fan out to create bizarre shapes.

To create the crocheted sculptures, Taimina increases the ratio of stitches in her rows so that the piece grows into what some complicated equations might look like if they were graphed in the hyperbolic plane. For demonstrations, she usually uses a ratio of 12:13. This means that after every twelve stitches she takes, she increases the row by one stitch, causing the rows to slowly increase in size.

Of course, the crocheted creations aren’t entirely mathematically accurate – you can’t really show exactly how a complicated equation is going to look just with yarn. However, it is helpful just to see a very basic representation of how such equations might look.

Taimina also uses this same technique to create yarn sculptures of certain types of coral as a way to show how math can sometimes present itself in unusual ways in nature. To check out her mathematical and coral creations, as well as other cool math info, go to http://hyperbolic-crochet.blogspot.com/.