Amanda Taylor Lipnicki, Megan Martinez

Boo, NB, Yves, Felicia, and Clint aren’t your typical family. Their forms were born from hundreds of hours of work by the artists on a program that automates the creation of crochet patterns for surfaces of revolution. The program intakes a positive differentiable function, x-bounds, a scale, and row and stitch gauges; from these, it outputs a pattern to crochet the associated surface of revolution. The program uses arclength integrals to create landmarks for row placement. A variant of the Hausdorff metric and modulus calculations are used to place increases and decreases within the rows. Details about this program can be found in our Bridges papers this year.

Little Quadric Lights was created by discretizing equations for quadric surfaces into crochet patterns. The mathematics involved calculations using level curves and arc length. Five of the six final crochet patterns were output by a program we created to automate patterns for surfaces of revolution. Our process, patterns, and code are shared in our paper "Hooked on Calculus: Crocheting Quadric Surfaces" published in the 2023 Bridges Conference Proceedings. For aesthetics, the crocheted surfaces were reinforced and stuffed with string lights using copper wire and tools. A black upholstered shadow box displays the lights in a dark environment, inspiring a sense of wonder and play as the quadrics glow from inside.