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Hexaflexagons [video] (2012)

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Re: Hexaflexagons [video] (2012)

#41

Post by MrsPeaches »

syntheweave wrote: post #38
MrsPeaches wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few random thoughts on this. 1. The main issue I see is that smartphones are primarily devices for consumption (vs creation). The creation you can do easily are well established tools (digital writing, photography and videography). Where TikTok and Insta have succeeded is simple editing tools for the latter two (+ sharing and social algos etc). 2. To the action we as technologist need to take, is to build tools for…

It's very easy to turn the smartphone into a reasonable creation tool, the trick is not act like the world ends at the bounds of the device. Seeing smartphone software as the complete editing tool - in the mold of desktop software - isn't that interesting, creatively speaking. It's very precise to use software in that way, to emulate professional workflows from generations ago and create all sorts of shortcuts and co…

Thank you for your thoughts.

> The things blocking creativity are a combination of the software ecosystem being unready to deprofessionalize itself and exit the industrialized "app" model

Could you explain what you mean here? Not sure I quite follow.

So one example of an app that does allow you to do creative things effectively is grageband on iOS. It's an amazing tool for sketching musical ideas, which can later be more closely refined at a full desktop setup, so in a sense I agree that smartphone software can't be seen as a "complete editing tool", though it can be used much earlier in the creative process. DAWs are pretty complex tools and if you can get a decent version of a DAW on a phone, I see no reason why other tools shouldn't be possible.

I guess one way of looking at it would be to compare an artist's sketchbook vs what they produce on canvas. One is small, portable and allows the artist to capture moments as come up. The canvas however is much larger, essentially static and requires long, painstaking work to get right. I am sure that I am not the first person think of this analogy, but that seems like the level of creation that is suitable for the form factor.

> turning the phone into a portable scanner or audio recorder

Sure, but they also use the caluclator, spirit level etc, these are all pretty established tools, just made more readily accessible, rather than harnessing all that computing and visualisation power a smartphone can offer.

Re: Hexaflexagons [video] (2012)

#42

Post by ChrisClark »

lmm wrote: post #37
sam_goody wrote: post #11

I saw a reference to Martin Gardner's article when I was in, maybe, 9th grade. So I went to the main branch of the NY public library ("reading between the lions") and looked up the article on microfiche. It was fascinating and fun - from how to make a row of equilateral triangles with nothing more than a ruler, pen and paper. Many, many hours were spent on the various flexagon derivatives. Years later, I made a JS pa…

> Nowadays, microfiche is gone, the public library is unfortunately not in most kids vernacular, and the attention span that would be required to enjoy doing the math I did has been hijacked. (TikTok !== figure-out-flexagon) The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.

Said every single generation once they got older.

Re: Hexaflexagons [video] (2012)

#44

Post by bigiain »

sam_goody wrote: post #11

I saw a reference to Martin Gardner's article when I was in, maybe, 9th grade. So I went to the main branch of the NY public library ("reading between the lions") and looked up the article on microfiche. It was fascinating and fun - from how to make a row of equilateral triangles with nothing more than a ruler, pen and paper. Many, many hours were spent on the various flexagon derivatives. Years later, I made a JS pa…

> I saw a reference to Martin Gardner's article when I was in, maybe, 9th grade.

> So I went to the main branch of the NY public library ("reading between the lions") and looked up the article on microfiche.

Ouch. Now I feel old. I read that article in Dad's collection of Scientific American magazines...

Re: Hexaflexagons [video] (2012)

#45

Post by lupire »

someweirdperson wrote: post #31
tunesmith wrote: post #27

The sixth video in the series is really a work of art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIyruYQ-N4Q&list=PLaNzoFtkQ7... I've thought a lot about arguments and premises and values and conclusions and how it connects with frustration and humiliation and shame, and really wasn't expecting all those subjects to come in in a video about hexaflexagons.

Quote from part 6: "The pink side with the yellow center is a theoretical possibility that remains unobserved as in practice it seems to be unopenupable."

Strangely, in the Gardner article that she used for the outline of her video, it explicitly states that its eqivalent of the pink side with yellow center is theoretically impossible, in the hexahexafrustragon.

Re: Hexaflexagons [video] (2012)

#47

Post by omneity »

Maybe someone with more specialized knowledge can shime in, but this looks awfully similar to me to a discretized SU(1) symmetry (maybe SU(2)? My intuition in Lie algebras is extremely rusty)

If so, hexaflexagons (or general flexagons) could present interesting analogies to Calabi-Yau manifolds, especially in terms of holonomic properties, which might yield some insights or parallels for type II string theory. Or in more intuitive terms as I see it, a flexagon looks suspiciously similar to a string oscillating on a folded dimension, but discretized as some sort of torus/state machine. (not a physicist, worked at a HEP lab ages ago, I hope some of my comment made sense)

Re: Hexaflexagons [video] (2012)

#48

Post by mlyle »

sam_goody wrote: post #22
O__________O wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TikTok has a lot of creative content on flexagons: https://www.tiktok.com/tag/flexagon It’s also not intended for long-form content, which is fine. If someone is super interested in the topic, related math, etc — easy to find information elsewhere using search engine and the short videos are much more likely to get someone’s attention.

Oh sure, the internet has a lot more related info readily available than was ever possible by using microfiche. And my phone can keep track of more more phone numbers than I was ever able to memorize. But, I know far fewer numbers now than I did as a kid, and my son will know far less than I did about flexagons. One reason may be because he knows it is readily available, he won't learn it himself. And one reason is b…

> And one reason is because there is so much surface level learning available, which is so easy and interesting to consume, that anything that takes work and time is postponed, and eventually conditioned to be ignored.

I also work with youth. I don't agree. I see youth go broad and go deep. There's terrific variation in aptitudes to go deep, but it's certainly out there. Most of us didn't live at the library and look for deep resources (you and I did). I think a bigger fraction of youth accomplish high levels of aptitude and find areas to go deep in than ever before.

I do think there's fundamental change-- not all of it negative. We had to plan our next move at the library, right? We had to think a long time for what a good next move was in our area of interest. Youth now can afford to be infinitely more speculative than we ever were able to get away with.

And, yes, smartphones and their social pressures add completely new problems and distractions, and many educational environments do not manage them well.

Re: Hexaflexagons [video] (2012)

#49

Post by miffy900 »

lmm wrote: post #37
sam_goody wrote: post #11

I saw a reference to Martin Gardner's article when I was in, maybe, 9th grade. So I went to the main branch of the NY public library ("reading between the lions") and looked up the article on microfiche. It was fascinating and fun - from how to make a row of equilateral triangles with nothing more than a ruler, pen and paper. Many, many hours were spent on the various flexagon derivatives. Years later, I made a JS pa…

> Nowadays, microfiche is gone, the public library is unfortunately not in most kids vernacular, and the attention span that would be required to enjoy doing the math I did has been hijacked. (TikTok !== figure-out-flexagon) The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.

Weird you would re-surface that quote in response to that, since I don't think a reasonable person would interpret it as a criticism of younger generations, but of the changing times we now live in.

No one ever starts at a public library to study a particular topic, you almost always go to an internet resource first [usually Google]. And TikTok/the internet generally, has hijacked attention spans, but not just of children, but of adults as well.

Re: Hexaflexagons [video] (2012)

#50

Post by anandology »

When I saw the name Vi Hart, the author of the video, it sounded quite familiar. It turned out that She is the daughter of George W Hart, a mathematician and polyhedron man. I'm a big fan of work zome geometry and amazing polyhedron.

If you are interested in recreational mathematics, don't miss to checkout https://georgehart.com/.

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