Extending Anna Weltman’s loop-de-loops with Frank Farris’s “Creating Symmetry”

We’ve had a ton of fun in the last couple of weeks with Ann Weltman’s loop-de-loop ideas:

  

Here are two of the projects that we did:

Anna Weltman’s loop-de-loops

Anna Weltman’s loop-de-loops part 2

Last night we stopped at a Barnes & Noble after dinner and I found a book that Evelyn Lamb had written about last month:

  

Here’s Evelyn Lamb’s piece:

Impossible Wallpaper and Mystery Curves by Evelyn Lamb

The book is absolutely wonderful and has so many cool examples. I’d hoped it would be easy to make some of the graphs in the book using Mathematica, and after a little documentation reading to kick off some rust, it wasn’t too hard:

 

At least visually the curves you can make from the idea in Farris’s book remind me of the loop-de-loops. I don’t really think it will be that productive to talk in detail with the boys about exponentials and graphing in the complex plane, but I do think they will like seeing the pictures and talking about them. I’m excited to show them some of the ideas from the book tomorrow morning.

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