Rosa Zwier
Rosa Zwier works for 3P Learning, creating educational videos about mathematics for Mathletics, after having studied pure mathematics at the University of Melbourne. She loves to explain mathematical concepts in creative and interesting ways. She came to love geometry after discovering spherical magnets and the amazing possibilities of what can be built with them. She has since been introduced to the world of mathematical art and has become passionate about it.
Magnetic spheres are often used to create interesting geometric sculptures. This sculpture was constructed from 1440 individual spheres.
The spheres are arranged into octagonal units, made from an inner ring of 8 spheres and an outer ring of 16 spheres, and 60 octagons were used in the sculpture. These octagonal units have saddle shaped hyperbolic curvature, and three of them can be joined together into a “hyperbolic pair of pants”.
The sculpture has the symmetry of a cube. It was made from 20 “pairs of pants” - 8 corresponding to the vertices of a cube and 12 corresponding to the edges.