stephan.com
scattered thoughts

I was just looking up minimal surfaces again for my project, and I found this lovely image of the Costa-Hoffman-Meeks Minimal Surface.
Anyway, imagine this surface, but knitted into a single piece of seamless fabric, with rings for tension at the top, bottom, and center, about 8 feet tall, suspended with wires in a gallery. You could touch it, run your hands along it.

Well, I know it would still be relegated to the cultural backwater of mathematical art, which no one in the art world takes seriously… but I have another surface in mind (can’t find a picture, probably not technically minimal) that would make a truly excellent and unique scarf, touching on the fashion world and giving the collectors a cheap little item to buy (
Oh, hey, here’s a page about someone who made a Costa surface out of snow!! Which is really dorky, but kinda cool too.

Oh, yeah, another math dork snow sculptor
(oh, wait, same guy, different web site), who also rides a bike with square wheels on a catenary road.

More for my own reference, here’s someone who did almost exactly what I want to do, but (IMHO) they cheated, using multiple flat panels and stitching them together. This shows the sort of tension I have in mind, though, as well as some directions I had been thinking about (and now plan to abandon) for tensigrity prosthetic armatures for dance (tubular and bone structures).