I came across this article from the Guardian recently about a husband and wife who explore math-inspired knitting.
Pat Ashforth and Steve Plummer have made more than 90 math-inspired afghans, as well as other expressions of mathematical ideas in knitting and crochet.
They share their creations at Wooly Thoughts, and their work has been featured at the Science Museum in London, among other places.
The pieces are beautiful even if you don’t know the meaning behind them, and the couple have used them to help illustrate and talk about mathematical concepts in classrooms, where everyone can look at and talk about the same model.
Their projects aim to take the stigma away from both men knitting and women doing math, and they say they hear a lot more that women say they can’t do math than men say they can’t knit. Here’s hoping projects like this can help put both of those stereotypes to rest.
[Photo by Pat Ashforth, via the Guardian.]
I knitted their Ring Road pattern from Ravelry. It was fun to knit and when I had a cylindrical mirror made for it, WOW!!
Check them out on ravelry.com