Day: January 25, 2017

Sharing Laura DeMarco’s and Kathryn Lindsey’s 3d folded fractals

Several weeks ago Quanta magazine published an article about incredible new work being done by Laura DeMarco and Kathryn Lindsey:

3-D Fractals Offer Clues to Complex Systems

Along with the article was a fun little paper folding contest that was won by Yoshiaki Araki. Here’s the starting fractal made using Mathematica:

julia

I was so excited to see Araki’s tweet and printed the shape that night!

The first thing I did was have the kids play with it and describe what they saw:

As a follow up to that initial exploration, I had each of the boys try the folding project from Quanta Magazine’s contest. It is a pretty challenging project for kids, but here’s how it came out. My older son first:

Next my younger son:

I’m really interested in learning more about these folded fractals. I would especially love to understand the basics of how the shapes fold up. Can’t wait to play with the ideas her more.

Paula Beardell Krieg’s intersecting squares

Saw a fun sequence of tweets from Paula Berdell Krieg last week:

Then . . . we received an envelope!

Next we compared the shape to the 3d prints it was based on:

After this I showed the boys the tweet above that shows how to unfold the shape into a cube and they were able to recreate the procedure:

Definitely a fun shape to explore – thanks to Paula for sending it to us! It really is amazing how much geometry you can explore just by folding paper 🙂