Product Description

This richly illustrated book discusses non-Euclidean geometry and the hyperbolic plane in an accessible way. The author provides instructions for how to crochet models of the hyperbolic plane, pseudosphere, and catenoid/helicoids. With this knowledge, the reader has a hands-on tool for learning the properties of the hyperbolic plane and negative curvature. The author also explores geometry and its historical connections with art, architecture, navigation, and motion, as well as the history of crochet, which provides a context for the significance of a physical model of a mathematical concept that has plagued mathematicians for centuries.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #296477 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .1 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 200 pages

Review
Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes is a work of gargantuan proportions whose influence will be measured for decades to come. Delightfully brilliant yet down to earth, Daina Taimina brings together the best aspects of right brain imagination and risk-taking with left brain facts, practicality, and pattern perception, creating a win-win situation that everyone will enjoy. Lavish with photos throughout the book, the art is creatively placed in nature and the math schematics are crisp and clear. Daina s compendium of crochet history is the best I have seen, and this book is a must for the bookshelves of crochet and math students alike. --Gwen Blakley Kinsler, Founder and proud Lifetime Member of the Crochet Guild of America

I highly recommend this book because of its unique combination of a historical account of hyperbolic geometry with the use of crochet as a tool for its understanding. Finally, we have a beautiful coffee-table book that uses visual delight to emphasise rather than hide serious mathematics. Readers with little knowledge of geometry or mathematics in general may find it hard to understand everything, but as Bill Thurston writes in his foreword: I hope this book gives you pause for thought and changes your way of thinking about mathematics. --London Mathematical Society Newsletter

It all amounts to an eye-and brain-opening journey connecting the history of ideas to their natural sources and practical applications. Lots to ponder. It takes a mind like Daina's to bring material like this together, and to convey it in scupltures that sit tranquilly in the natural landscape. --Crochet Insider

From the Author
Writing this book I kept in mind that "a picture is worth 1000 words" - therefore 300 pictures in the book with expanded captures. So it is possible to read this book as a picture book. This is what children like to do. Then next level in this book is the text - if some of the pictures have caught the interest of a reader, then it is possible to get more explanation by reading the text close to the picture. For those who really want to know more and deeper - look in endnotes where I put a lot of references for further reading.
The idea to write this book grew out of many questions I was asked after my talks. Hope I have answered many of these questions. And I keep waiting for new ones!

About the Author
Daina Taimina was born in Riga, Latvia in 1954 the same year as an International Congress of Mathematicians pivotal to non-Euclidean geometry (as she describes in the Introduction), so her influence on the hyperbolic plane almost seems fated. Now a professor of mathematics at Cornell University, Taimina regularly participates in art exhibitions and educational workshops related to her crocheted models. She was nominated as one of the Most Innovative People and Organizations in the Science and Technology World in 2006.