Rashmi Sunder-Raj
I seek patterns to make sense of my world. Some of these I choose to
interpret as visual images. Sometimes this involves tessellations,
sometimes crochet...and sometimes other things.
This image depicts the first few rows of Pascal’s Triangle seen as
a binary tree with interwoven branches. It was made by separating
each entry into a sum of ones and allowing the branches to show
paths taken by the ones in moving from row to row. It was used as
the representative image in a
video (shown at The
Bridges Conference Short Film Festival in 2019) which explored the
idea of tracing the how the entries in the triangle are formed.
This is a pattern with 20-fold rotational symmetry using 40 copies
of a unit that I refer to as a ‘wedge squiggle’ (where an
isosceles triangle, a sequence and switching directions are used
to construct a compound shape with interesting properties, see
https://twitter.com/i/moments/1050938075222855680). In this case, the angle of each wedge is 18° (2π/20) and as a
consequence, the shape obtained by the sequence of 1,2,3...20
wedges mostly fits within a triangle whose least angle is 9°
(2π/40) (with a few bits sticking out). So 40 of them can fit
together tightly if we allow a little bit of overlap near the
center.