Artists
Eve Torrence
Professor Emeritus of Mathematics
Randolph-Macon College
Ashland, Virginia, USA
Statement
I enjoy creating sculptures that allow me to share the beauty of geometry and topology with a general audience. I usually work with inexpensive materials, such as yarn, paper, felt, and craft foam. These materials adapt well to hands-on workshops, allowing me to share my discoveries and designs. I hope to communicate that mathematics is accessible and interesting to people who may have never had the opportunity to be inspired by mathematics.
Artworks
Max Maps
20.0 x 45.0 x 45.0 cm
yarn, fishing line
2026
These crocheted punctured surfaces model maps on the torus, the real projective plane, and the Klein bottle. The colored boundary of each puncture represents a solid region of the map that fills the puncture. The narrow surface bands represent the boundaries, which form the dual of $K_7$ on the torus (Heawood graph), the dual of $K_6$ on $RP^2$ (Petersen graph), and the dual of $K_6$ on the Klein bottle. Every pair of regions shares an edge of the graph, giving a model of a map that requires the maximal number of colors for a proper coloring of any map on that surface.
These designs are by Shiying Dong and appear in our book, "Unraveling Topological Crochet" (CRC Press, 2026).