Geometry and Movie Making

Animation studios use a great deal of geometry.  Here is a wonderful video about Pixar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mX0NB9IyYpU

Platonic Solids

I think my next tattoo may involve the Platonic solids, see this cool link:

http://puncturedartefact.wordpress.com/2013/10/13/symbolism-the-platonic-solids-tattoo-design-and-culture/ 

 Here is a sample from the website above:

And of course there are connections between the Platonic Solids and the Golden Ratio:
http://www.maths.surrey.ac.uk/hosted-sites/R.Knott/Fibonacci/phi3DGeom.html
http://jwilson.coe.uga.edu/emat6680/parveen/platonic_solids.htm

Numberphile youtube video on the Platonic Solids: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVzu1_12FUc

Platonic Solids and cosmology:

http://www.kheper.net/topics/cosmology/solids.html

This website includes a photo of stone models of the solids that are dated to be 10 centuries before the Greeks.  Wow.

Golden Ratio and Fractal Trees

I first became interested in the golden ratio when I was a PhD student at Dalhousie.  I started tutoring a local sculptor who wanted to learn more math to help with his amazing wood carvings.  He told me about the golden ratio- I had honestly never encountered it until then (this was before the da Vinci Code made it really famous).  At first I was a little skeptical, and didn't want it to distract from my own work on fractal trees.  But then I realized that my favourite trees happened to scale according to the golden ratio- they seemed to line up and just generally look nicer than most other trees.  Then I became a little obsessed with learning more- so connections with the pentagon, Fibonacci, etc. 

Here is a blog about the golden ratio and fractal trees, written by a guy who only had his BSc at the time of writing it.  I met him at a conference on math and art, it was really cool because he had actually read a paper of mine (I tend to assume that nobody else is interested in what I am doing). 

http://blog.wolfram.com/2014/05/22/adventures-into-the-mathematical-forest-of-fractal-trees/

Great Link about Curvature and Pringles Chips

This link gives a wonderful explanation of curvature, and discusses spheres and pringles (hyperbolic geometry)

How to hold pizza

Math 371: First Post

So here goes... just want to start the ball rolling with a blog for Modern Geometries.  My hope is that we can post interesting links, photos, questions, observations here to share with other members of the class. 

Here is the link to the Museum of Mathematics in New York that I mentioned in class.  It was so cool!

http://momath.org/ (Museum of Mathematics)

And here is me as a fractal tree at the museum (when I was able to stand without crutches LOL):