We’ve seen three references to Borromean rings in the last few days. None of the references had anything to do with each other, but taken together . . . well, I figured we had to do a project.
The first reference was in our new book about knots:
The second was in the newly released Numberphile video with Tadashi Tokieda
The release of this video was sort of a double coincidence since we just saw Tokieda give a talk at MIT last weekend. Our project based on that talk is here:
Tadashi Tokieda’s “World from a sheet of paper” lecture
The third was in a George Hart video that Laura Taalman tweeted out today. The video is from 2012 and I can’t believe that I’d never seen it before. The boys are excited to try out some of the programs he mentions for a new 3d printing project. Can’t wait 🙂
After watching George Hart’s video we started our short little project. The first thing that I wanted to do was see if the boys could figure out how to orient the Sierpinski tetrahedron so that it looked like a square. They were able to do it and there was even a surprising (and totally accidental) twist!
We have a 3d printed Sierpinski Tetrahedron thanks to Laura Taalman’s amazing Makerhome blog:
The Sierpinski tetrahedron on Laura Taalman’s Makerhome blog
Here’s our talk about the shape:
Next we talked about Borromean rings. It was a fun challenge to the boys to make the shape out of the “tangle” that comes with Colin Adams’s “Why Knot?” book. I loved the way the boys worked together to figure out how to make the shape:
So, a fun coincidence seeing three different references to Borromean rings in the last couple of days. It was fun to turn all of those references into a little project for the boys.
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