I'm on a few knitting mailing lists, and lately I've seen two calls for submissions for new books-one of patterns for bigger women, and one for a book for teenagers, which is apparently to include sections for jocks, goth, punks-and nerds.
Which makes me wonder. Why isn't there a book-or at least website-for knitting just for nerds?
Some links to the sorts of patterns which could go in such a thing:
- Knitted nonorientable manifolds: Möbius bands, the klein bottle, and RP².
- Nate Berglund's one-sided surfaces: a (simple) Möbius scarf, Klein hat, and projective-plane hat. (Very nice ones, too, with no holes.)
- djinnj's nicer möbius stole and möbius tutorial.
- A new knit stitch invented just to try to make Möbius scarves more symmetric.
- Several nice, but unwearable, embeddings. And here's some more!
- Sarah-Marie's math knit page. A bunch of clothing Möbius bands, Klein bottles, and the real projective plane. These don't have self-intersection; hence the Klein bottle and RP² have holes. (This is why I like Nate Berglund's stuff better.) She also some notes on knitted hyperbolic planes, some braids, and lots of links.
- My klein bottles
- Klein bottle hat at Knitty. Not a particularly nice one.
- Crocheting the hyperbolic plane, and a whole gallery of examples
-
The Lorenz manifold and a
PDF with instructions.
- A crocheted Siefert surface. This is a mathematical surface whose boundary is a knot.
- Woolly Thoughts afghans-lots of cute knitted afghans, mostly multicolored.
- Woolly Thoughts Yahoo! group-cool photos.
- Eleanor Kent has some pretty multicolored knitted swatches that look vaguely contour-like or fractal-like.
- Fibonnacci stripes.
- Penrose diagram on a scarf
- Random cables: conventional cables with random twists, and an overall pattern.
- A Sierpinski shawl (crochet)
- A picture of some Platonic solids crocheted by Miyuki Kawamura. Sadly, nobody has instructions.
- A knitted tetrahedronal dice bag.
Now all I need is to work out instructions for one that doesn't involve quite so much seaming.
- Maxwell's equations (in colorwork, down at the bottom.) I think I would like to work out some way of doing this as a cable pattern instead.
- Chemistry:
- Flying Spaghetti Monster hat (crochet)
- Crocheted snowflakes (or at least, the six-pointed ones.)
- A knitted uterus
- A crocheted eyeball (warning: PDF file)
- A very nice knit squid
- Knitted brains
- A knitted heart
- A knitted microbe
- More microbes
- The Linux penguin (knit)
- The Binary scarf
- The Mario blanket (Tunisian crochet)
- The LOTR sweater with Fair Isle (knit) runes.
- LOTR cables: The tree of Gondor, tree cables in general, and cabled runes.
-
Stuffed Cthulhu, another stuffed Cthulhu,
felted Cthulhu mask and a colorwork pattern. (knit)
- The Doctor Who scarf (knit)
- Katamari Damacy hat (knit)
Note: if any of these links are broken, try entering the URL into
the Wayback machine.
And some plans:
- Fractal stitch patterns-Sierpinski shawl, Sierpinski carpet, possibly that flow snake from Math Quilts, the dragon curve, Penrose tilings, etc.
- rhitsqueaky suggests space-filling curves and cellular automata.
- Fibonacci-related stuff: domino/square tilings, or a rectangle made of squares with fibonnaci-number-length sides. Or maybe a pentagonal star.
- Come to think of it, if you can do a pentagonal star, you can probably manage the Petersen graph.
- Pythagorean-theorem proof as a little square (or rectangular) pattern. Unfortunately, I think this one may need to be multicolor.
- D8 afghan. (64 of any non-symmetrical square block can make this one. I originally thought of this as a quilt pattern, but it works here too.)
- Siefert surfaces as bags, tank tops, or just cool thingies (like the hyperbolic plane above)
- Cross-cap mittens
- More polyhedral dice bags. (rhitsqueaky suggests stuffing them and using them as car dice.)
- Crocheted chess pieces
- Escher paintings
- Borromean Rings. I'd base this on Marley or Steve's strap.
- Equations as cables or as stranded colorwork
Come to think of it, the vast majority of this stuff is mathematical.