Gallery: You're Never Too Old to Color—Especially Math Patterns
Edmund Harriss/courtesy The Experiment01De-four-mation
Deformations are tiling patterns in which the tiles change ever so slowly while keeping the pattern the same. M.C. Escher worked with deformations, but his would always go from left to right or top to bottom. What Harriss did for this image was make four tilings and then place them in each corner and let them morph into each other. “Usually deformations change from one thing to another,” Bellos says. “Here four of them deform into each other.”
David Bailey/courtesy The Experiment02Interflocking Birds
The tiling on this image is not only periodic, like the deformations, but it also has four points of rotational symmetry. That means if you choose a bird you can rotate the image 180 degrees around those points—either wing, the bottom of the torso, or the tip of the head—and the pattern will fit exactly over the original. This image, Bellos says, is “by David Bailey and inspired by MC Escher.”
Edmund Harriss/courtesy The Experiment03Julia Set
This is “a famous fractal named after Gaston Julia,” Bellos says of the Julia Set here. The French mathematician developed the theory that led to this ornate design. “The more you zoom in on the shape, the more the spirals repeat themselves,” Bellos adds.
Edmund Harriss/courtesy The Experiment04Octaplex
An octaplex is a four-dimensional shape that has 24 octahedrons as faces. What’s rendered here is the shadow of an octaplex in 2-D. “It is possible to count all 24 octahedrons that are flattened on the page.” Bellos says of this image. “Can you find them?”
Edmund Harriss/courtesy The Experiment05Read the Sines
This image *looks* like a bunch of stacked soup cans, but it’s actually a series of sinusoids, which you probably knew in school as sine waves. “When stacked on each other they give an interesting effect—tiles of a roof, scales of a fish, or waves of an ocean,” says Bellos.
Edmund Harriss/courtesy The Experiment06SeVenn
Most of us know Venn diagrams as two overlapping circles. This one is much more complex. “Remember the two-set Venn diagram from school? It has two circles with an intersection in the middle,” Bellos explains. “This is a Venn diagram with *seven* sets—the peculiar shape of each set is because you need to include every possible combination of intersections between all the sets.”
