Sarah-Marie Belcastro's long, lavishly illustrated article on the mathematics of knitting and mathematical knitting is a totally fascinating read: chewy, mathy, and inspiring. Makes me want to go and get some yarn.
Over the years I've knitted many Klein bottles, as well as other mathematical objects, and have continually improved my designs. When I began knitting mathematical objects, I was not aware of any earlier such work. But people have been expressing mathematics through knitting for a long time. The oldest known knitted mathematical surfaces were created by Scottish chemistry professor Alexander Crum Brown. In 1971, Miles Reid of the University of Warwick published a paper on knitting surfaces. In the mid-1990s, a technique for knitting Möbius bands from Reid's paper was reproduced and spread via the then-new Internet. (Nonmathematician knitters also created patterns for Möbius bands; one, designed to be worn as a scarf, was created by Elizabeth Zimmerman in 1989.) Reid's pattern made its way to me somehow, and it became the inspiration for a new design for the Klein bottle. Math knitting has caught on a bit more since then, and many new patterns are available. Some of these are included in two volumes I coedited with Carolyn Yackel: Making Mathematics with Needlework (2007) and Crafting by Concepts (2011)…
…Most knitted-in designs are mathematically challenging because of the discretization problem: A smooth line or patch of color drawn on a piece of paper or electronically must be knitted as a sequence of discrete stitches. This harkens back to the mesh shown in Figures 3 and 4. Computer scientists who work on visualization of 3D objects have developed algorithms for imposing a mesh on an idealized object. A finer mesh gives a smoother look, and in fact the use of very fine meshes is what produces realistic computer-generated imagery. In knitting, creating a finer mesh requires both a thinner yarn and substantially more time to complete the project. A great application of meshes to knitting appears in a 2012 SIGGRAPH paper, in which Cem Yuksel, Jonathan M. Kaldor, Doug L. James and Steve Marschner explain how they use a mostly rectangular mesh to produce highly realistic virtual knitted garments.
Adventures in Mathematical Knitting [Sarah-Marie Belcastro/American Scientist]
(Thanks, Sigma Xi Member!)
