The 2×1 rectangle and Domes

March 26, 2012

Next week I am going to be at the Gathering for Gardner, an exciting meeting of mathematicians, magicians, puzzlers and others inspired by the life and work of Martin Gardner. This post is a version of the talk I will be giving.

The 2×1 rectangle is not one of mathematics most celebrated shapes.

Yet it is so much more flexible than the more common square.

Even better you can cut it in half on the diagonal to make a 2×1 right triangle,

which has the beautiful property that it is a 5-reptile. Five copies of it come together to make a larger version. Repeating this gives the Conway Pinwheel tiling, which has triangles occurring in an infinite number of directions.

Yet the 2×1 rectangle is a lot more common in life, just go into your local hardware store:

Using the diagonal cut triangle and uncut rectangles, Vinay Gupta designed the hexayurt,

a small house that can be built from 12 sheets, without waste. In contrast to geodesic domes, that cannot be made from sheet materials without making many cuts or wasting material. Here is one:

and a plywood one:

Hexayurts have become one of the standard accommodations at Burning Man:

or look at this map, the red dots show the location of the hundreds of hexayurts at last years event.

Vinay set me the challenge of making larger domes using these shapes. The hexayurt itself suggests that hexagons will be important, and we can put two 2×1 rectangles together to make a square. Squares and hexagons come together to form the truncated octahedron.

This obviously would not work as a dome, so we must cut it. There are two natural cuts that can be made. One perpendicular to the 4-fold axis, and one perpendicular to the 3-fold:

So we have two new larger domes, the tri-dome and the quad-dome:

What is really cool is that both of these domes were made for Burning Man last year:

Tri-dome:

Quad-dome:

One neat thing about the truncated Octahedron is that it is a space-filler. You can use them to tile 3d space. We can therefore bring quad-domes together to make even larger structures, like this one:

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Posted by gelada

Hyperboloid lighting

November 6, 2011

The hyperboloid of one sheet is a fascinating shape that turns up in many places. It was therefore a great example to take for a test of thearender which I recently purchased. This shows off its double ruled nature:

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Posted by gelada

Magnetic Klein Quartic

October 2, 2011

The Klein Quartic is a absolutely fascinating object and worthy of a post in its own right, or even a book. It is clear evidence of the explosion of imagination and creativity in geometry that was taking place in the nineteenth century, as it cut its ties to the “real world”. Since then it has turned up all over mathematics.

One way to consider the Klein quartic is as a generalisation of a regular polyhedron. The tetrahedron has three equilateral triangles meeting at each corner, the cube has three squares and the dodecahedron three pentagons. Three hexagons gives a tiling of the plane. Why stop there? What about three regular heptagons? There are important reasons why this does not work in a simple manner. By playing fast and loose with what we mean by “regular heptagon” however we can do something. One object we can make is the Klein quartic. It does not produce something like a sphere, as the tetrahedron, cube and dodecahedron do, instead it is more like a pretzel with three holes.

Combining these ideas with little spherical magnets, we can make a model of the Klein Quartic. To do this we obviously have to start by making a heptagon

You start with a ring of seven balls, then put another ring of 14 balls around it. Note as this happens the heptagon buckles into a saddle shape. This is because the balls naturally create angles of 120˚ at the corners. As we move round the shape therefore we turn through a total of 7*120 = 480˚, this is greater than 360˚. We say the resulting surface has negative Gaussian curvature. We may also consider the length of the second loop. It is roughly distance 2 from the centre of our shape, yet it has length 14. If it were a circle of radius 2 the circumference would be 2*2π, which is less than 14.

Two of these heptagons can fit together on an edge:

For fans of Indra’s pearls and sphere reflections the balls make a pretty pattern.


As the angle at the corner is 120˚ three will fit round a corner:

We could now continue this, bringing three heptagons together at each corner, but we want to create the finite object. Next attach an additional heptagon to each of the outer three:

Now connect the three outside heptagons together. to make a surface with three holes:

You need to repeat this four times, using a total of 24 heptagons. As you make them, be careful of one thing, the magnets line up so that you get  all N poles on one side of the surface and all S on the other. As you connect each surface, therefore, make sure that it agrees with the others:

When you have all four, put one at the center and then connect the others to each of its four holes

To finish, technically we should connect up the remaining six holes so each branch is connected to both the others. The resulting shape has three heptagons meeting at every corner, and a wonderful collection of symmetries many of which cannot be easily seen in this model, or any model in 3d!

Just for kicks, lets finish with the work of one of Klein’s contemporaries a Möbius strip:

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Posted by gelada

Hexayurt dome details and models

August 7, 2011

People are now starting to build my tri-dome and quad-dome versions of the hexayurt, so it is time to give some of the technical details. To start, however, here is an application of the intermediate value theorem!

When I started working on the details for the tri-dome I realised I had made a bad assumption (thinking that the form was geometrically pure). This means that some of the details in my original write up were wrong. All a little embarrassing. Ironically, I might have missed a form that does actually work, had I not made the bad assumption. The shape, like the hexayurt, starts with a hexagonal based pyramid. In a traditional hexayurt this lies on top of a hexagon of vertical walls. Instead of this we attach a square to three of the edges and the classic hexayurt triangle (isocoles triangle with base and height the same length) to the other three. We can look at what happens as the pyramid is moved away from the ground, while the edges of the shapes rest on it:

This does not give a great building; there are holes. The holes are triangles and two of the sides have a fixed length. The final edge changes length, starting long, and ending short. We know we can fill the holes with classic hexayurt triangles. Two of the edges are the right length we just need the third. The length changes smoothly as we raise the roof, and starts shorter and ends longer than we want. Here we can apply the intermediate value theorem, so the correct length must be passed. As a mathematician I would stop there, the system works; however people are building the things…

So to calculate the correct angle for the square sides of the model we can look vertically down, calling the angle of the square face θ, (and assuming that the boards we are using are 8′ by 4′) needing as the classic maths problem asks to “find x”.In this case

x = 4 \sqrt{4 \cos(\theta)^2+1+2\sqrt{3}\cos(\theta)},

we want x = 4\sqrt{5} so:

4\sqrt{5} = 4 \sqrt{4 \cos(\theta)^2+1+2\sqrt{3}\cos(\theta)}

5 = 4 \cos(\theta)^2+1+2\sqrt{3}\cos(\theta)

0 = 2 \cos(\theta)^2 + \sqrt{3}\cos(\theta) - 2

Solving the quadratic:

\cos(\theta) = \frac{-\sqrt{3} \pm \sqrt{19}}{4}

Which gives an angle of about 49°, and the height of the roof (assuming 4′x8′ panels) is 8 \sin(\theta), just over 6′ at the edge and 10′ in the centre. We can use these, and useful facts about general tetrahedra to calculate all the angles between faces by using the lengths of their edges. If you want to follow the details yourself, you need to add vectors to get some of the edge lengths, then use the Cayley-Menger determinant to find the volume of the tetrahedron, and then the generalised Sine rule to (halfway down this page) to give the angle.

Technical details for TriDome: angles to nearest half degree, lengths to nearest inch (assuming 4'x8' panels). On the left the angles between faces and point heights, on the right lengths and angles of the base.

Technical details for QuadDome: angles to nearest half degree, lengths to nearest inch (assuming 4'x8' panels). On the left the angles between faces and point heights, on the right lengths and angles of the base.

Finally here are the hexayurt models (rhino 3dm and vrml formats) of the hexayurt, H13, TriDome, QuadDome, plus a couple of others, including a very large one.

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Posted by gelada

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