A coral is growing and maybe there is a bit more sunlight on this side, or the nutrient flow of water is a bit more on this side, so it grows a bit more curly on this side. "But mathematically perfectly regular things very rarely appear in nature. If the rate remains unvaried, a perfect hyperbolic form emerges, "something you could take into a math classroom," Wertheim said.
Im pro global warming code#
"So there's this lovely story, that underlying the making of these objects is both feminine handicraft but also knowledge about the foundations of geometry," said Wertheim, who started crocheting with her sister in her early teens.Īt its most basic, the hyperbolic crochet code involves increasing stitches at a regular rate. The Crochet Coral Reef uses her hyperbolic crochet code as its base pattern, turning the handicraft into a form of applied mathematics. Mathematicians long considered hyperbolic geometry impossible to model, but in 1997, Daina Taimina, a mathematician at Cornell University in New York, realized that such models could be created by doing what women had been doing at home for centuries: crocheting. Now the Frieder Burda Museum in Baden-Baden, southwestern Germany, is featuring the installation in a giant retrospective show, titled "Value and Transformation of Corals."Ĭorals are vibrantly colored hyperbolic structures, which mathematicians longer thought impossible to model In 2019 it gained widespread international attention at the Venice Biennale. Since the project's launch, an estimated 2 million people have seen Crochet Coral Reef in galleries and museums around the world. We had no idea it could evolve to this big."
"The scale that the project has been embraced at on the international level is absolutely delightful. "If anyone had said to me in 2005 that I'd still be crocheting corals in 2022, I would've thought they were mad," Margaret Wertheim told DW.
What started 17 years ago as a way to draw attention to global warming caused by human activities has grown into quite possibly the world's largest collective art and science initiative: the Crochet Coral Reef project.Īlong with the Wertheim sisters, more than 20,000 participants - mostly women - around the world have spent countless hours crocheting millions of stitches, creating woolly corals and other undersea creatures that the sisters then join together in a large-scale and endlessly evolving collective art installation. Around 2005, scientists started finding that coral bleaching events, like in the Great Barrier Reef (above), were due to ocean warming caused by humans
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