Go figure

I'm late to catch on that there is a Los Angeles-based Institute for Figuring, started by author, science writer and PBS host Margaret Wertheim and her sister Christine Wertheim, an author, artist and CalArts professor. My introduction comes from a story in today's New York Times about a Cornell math researcher who crochets hard-to-visualize geometric shapes. She has become a celebrity in the math and knitting worlds, and will be in L.A. in August to lecture to the Institute for Figuring at the Machine Project on Alvarado Street. The IFF website explains itself this way:

The Institute For Figuring is an educational organization dedicated to enhancing the public understanding of figures and figuring techniques. From the physics of snowflakes and the hyperbolic geometry of sea slugs, to the mathematics of paper folding and graphical models of the human mind, the Institute takes as its purview a complex ecology of figuring...

The Institute does not yet have a physical space, but our permanent location in the conceptual landscape is on the edge of this iconic fractal.

Ohhhhkay. For those who get it, the institute recently published its first book. The image above is titled crocheted model of a pseudosphere-hyperbolic radius 4 centimeters.