Amenda Chow; Amanda Garcia
Amenda Chow: In 2017, I became inspired by the relationship between math and art. Since then I have found ways to incorporate art into my teaching and research of applied mathematics. This also led to my collaboration with Amanda Garcia who introduced me to crocheting and the mathematical patterns that can be created in this context.
Amanda Garcia: I found crochet and knitting as I was finishing my PhD in Systems Design Engineering and have been working with yarn ever since. In particular, I am interested in exploring mathematical concepts through the fibre arts.
Tessellated Hysteresis Loops is our first collaboration and was based on Amenda's doctoral research on hysteresis.
Hysteresis is a complex phenomenon that occurs frequently in nature and engineering applications such as in the dynamics of magnetization or fluidic processes like freezing and thawing. Graphically, hysteresis typically appears as closed simple curves, which are fondly called hysteresis loops. Exploring the shape of hysteresis loops provides insights into the behaviour of the dynamical system it comes from, and consequentially, they are often generated using computer software. In this work, we create hysteresis loops through the tactile medium of yarn. The result is a unique tessellation pattern.