hyperbolic crochet – What Kirsty did next

For the last few weeks I’ve been merrily crocheting maths, in pretty colours and various wavy and wonderful shapes which look like corals and other undersea creatures like nudibranches. The process is pretty simple: you start with a small chain or circle of stitches and keep increasing at the same rate, and after a few rounds or rows the fabric starts to create hyperbolic geometry. Nature likes hyperbolic forms as it maximises the surface area of a life form – perfect for filter feeding organisms like corals to get the most out of their environment. Curly lettuces also have this hyperbolic geometry (or negative curvature),

In 1997 Dr Daina Taimina, a professor at Cornell University, discovered that the best way for humans to make models which demonstrate this geometry is with crochet – just by modifying the basic crochet code you can create these weird and wonderful shapes. She wrote a book about it, explaining the history and development of non-Euclidean geometry and its applications to art, music, computer science and all sorts of other clever things. It’s the only maths book I have ever read for fun, thanks to cousin Sal who needed a model made for demonstrating the concept of hyperbolic space to teenagers.

It also demonstrates exponential growth, which we all heard far too much about in the early days of this blog in the guise of the R-number. Associate Professor of biostatistics and owner of the science/knitting blog https://www.statistrikk.no/, Kathrine Frey Froslie, used the technique to create a visual version of the way Covid-19 was spreading. You can watch a video about it here.

I’m using patterns from the Crochet Coral Reef project by Christine Wertheim & Margaret Wertheim of the Institute For Figuring. “The Crochet Coral Reef is an artwork responding to climate change and also a global community-based exercise in applied mathematics and evolutionary theory.”

This makes me sound ever so clever, doesn’t it. I’m not going to pretend I understand the maths behind it all but I do understand that the process of making these is repetitive, and mindful, and while I’m trying to download a whole new job into my brain that’s exactly what I need from a project! So that’s what they’re for.