Saturday 30 January 2010

Don't Miss These

Dan MacKinnon over at Math Recreations has a nice blog about Appoloinian Gaskets formed by Ford Circles (what you get when the steering wheel comes off a Model A) and the relationship of course to Farey Sequences..(If you ever added fractions the way they told you was wrong... this is your revenge).

Also Robert Talbet over at Casting Out Nines has a nice video about Sierpinski's gasket as part of a Dorito Ad for the Super Bowl..... Fractals make the big time...

Addendum... Cory Poole, the teacher of the students who created the fractal commented on this post, Nice job Cory, you have ever reason to be justly proud of your students.

After getting Cory's message, I tracked down one of his web sites where he explains the process of construction (and some notes on motivation)... see it here

3 comments:

Cory said...

The video you are referring to, I made with the help of 30 of my high school math students. We built a 64 foot Sierpinski triangle out of about 12000 tortilla chips and then made a humorous and exciting commercial for Doritos to be entered in a contest. While it didn't win, I was quite happy with the result and having my students learn some more about fractals. Feel free to check it out here as well.


http://www.blownapartstudios.com/

Thanks,

Cory Poole

Pat's Blog said...

OK, quick followup... if you use 12,000 Dorito chips, for a 64 foot equilateral triangle, What level does the fractal depict?

Cory said...

So if you look at the project link on www.blownapartstudios.com there is a little more information but basically, we did not have iteration 0 be a single chip since we were worried about visibility since the fractal really does dissapear as you iterate out further especially since you are limited to the pixel count of the camera. Instead iteration 0 (or 1 depending on how you like to count)is a 1 foot triangle made up of about 16 chips (give or take depending on the builder). Then we had 3^6 of these making it approximately 12000 chips. So this would be iteration 6 (or 7 depending on your method of counting)