The Mathematics of Crochet
hellohartblog.wordpress.com
hellohartblog.wordpress.com
My daughter just choose to do her big final school project on hyperbolic geometry, which I suspect was strongly influenced by her irrepressible urge to involve crochet in her exam work somehow.. So crochet inspires kids to do math. True!
Our daughter is not so much into the pure math side but loves to do amigurumi, which is really applied 3D modelling. A craft show she wants to do later in the year doesn't allow the use of other people's models, so she is having to design her own. It's so very impressive, and she gets so much joy from seeing kids really, really want her work, as they do. It's math, modelling, color matching design, and understanding the kinds of threads all rolled up into one, so to speak :-)
Knitting happens in parallel, with X loops cast on the needle. And sometimes (cabling) you execute those threads out of order.
I think that it's fun to HACK (half-ass crochet/knit) when there is plenty of time.
Always amazed at how mathematics' various specialties relate to everyday activities in sometimes very subtle ways.
As a tangent -- In studying numerical analysis, I was tested with a question of a logistic model applied to rabbit populations (of all things). You know, the one that generates bifurcation diagrams and is closely associated with chaos theory. Anyway, it was just a reminder in the moment about how such seemingly familiar phenomena can be explained by these seemingly obscure mathematical models (such as numerical differentiation.)
I decided not to try this out on the crochet cardigan my wife is making for me at the moment
MoMath used to run an Online Topological Crochet class. I'm not sure if they will be bringing it back, though. https://momath.org/onlinecrochet/