Good morning everyone,

How is it going? I hope you have had a good week and that you, like me, are looking forward to the weekend. Today’s Fem Fri was inspired by a subscriber submission, so many thanks, friend and subscriber!

Daina Taimiða is a mathematician who works on hyperbolic planes. These were very fussy and difficult to represent physically until she solved the problem with crochet. Enjoy this interview about maths and crochet:

I realized that Thurston’s construction could be made with knitting or crochet—basically all you’d have to do is increase the number of stitches in each row. I grew up in Latvia doing these handicrafts and I decided to try and make one. At first I tried knitting, but after a while you had so many stitches on the needles it became impossible to handle. I realized that crochet was the best method.

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/16/crocheting.php

Obviously I immediately wanted to find a hyperbolic plane crochet pattern and obviously Cornell’s maths department delivered. NB I don't crochet, I just wanted to be sure that if I did one of my projects could be this one:

In order to make the crocheted hyperbolic plane you need just a very basic crocheting skills. All you need to know is how to make a chain (to start) and how to single crochet. That's it! Now you can start.

http://pi.math.cornell.edu/~dwh/papers/crochet/crochet.html

Finally, I’m an enormous fan of Janelle Shane’s AI Weirdness, and here’s her AI knitting patterns in further maths/handicrafts collaborations:

Knitters are very good at debugging patterns, as it turns out. Not only are there a lot of knitters who are coders, but debugging is such a regular part of knitting that the complicated math becomes second nature. Notation is not always consistent, some patterns need to be adjusted for size, and some simply have mistakes.

https://aiweirdness.com/post/173096796277/skyknit-when-knitters-teamed-up-with-a-neural

Have a great weekend! Maybe try some weird crafts!

A xx.