15:12
Osinga & Krauskopf: Lorenz crochet
Needlework is in the air: Paul commented on the Freddie Robins post about crocheting in the hyperbolic plane, then today infosthetics.com has a post about stitched DOS commands.
The infosthetics post also reminded me of a project by Doctors Hinke Osinga and Bernd Krauskopf, both Ph.D.s in Mathematics, who created a crochet model of the Lorenz manifold. (Yes, those are real crochet details you see in the picture.)
The Lorenz attractor is one of the best known strange attractors, but this has to be the most labor-intensive visualization of it ever produced. Some googling unearthed their scientifc paper on the project: Crocheting the Lorenz manifold at the Bristol Centre for Applied Nonlinear Mathematics. Supposedly, the good doctors have promised a bottle of champagne to anyone who repeats their effort.
That is completly insane. Imagine the old sweet mom of one of the Math-professors, sitting in her old house with the patchwork-covers on her knees, the cat is purring content and she is crotching her son a Lorenz attractor. “No mom, its not dz/dt = b z(x-c), that is the Roessler attractor!”