Tuesday, September 30, 2014

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/

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

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):