The art of crochet is used to represent hyperbolic geometry.
Daina Taimina, a mathematician at Cornell University, made the first useable physical model of the hyperbolic—a feat many mathematicians had believed was impossible—using, of all things, crochet. Taimina and her husband, David Henderson, a geometer at Cornell, are the co-authors of Experiencing Geometry, a widely used textbook on both Euclidean and non-Euclidean spaces. Margaret Wertheim, founder of the Institute for Figuring and a new regular contributor to Cabinet, spoke to them about crocheting and non-Euclidean geometry.
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