Visualizing Mathematics With 3d Printing

The first book to explain mathematics using 3D printed models. Winner of the Technical Text of the Washington Publishers Wouldn’t it be great to experience three-dimensional ideas in three dimensions? In this book—the first of its kind—mathematician and mathematical artist Henry Segerman takes readers on a fascinating tour of two-, three-, and four-dimensional mathematics, exploring Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries, symmetry, knots, tilings, and soap films. Visualizing Mathematics with 3D Printing includes more than 100 color photographs of 3D printed models. Readers can take the book’s insights to a new level by visiting its sister website, 3dprintmath.com, which features virtual three-dimensional versions of the models for readers to explore. These models can also be ordered online or downloaded to print on a 3D printer. Combining the strengths of book and website, this volume pulls higher geometry and topology out of the realm of the abstract and puts it into the hands of anyone fascinated by mathematical relationships of shape. With the book in one hand and a 3D printed model in the other, readers can find deeper meaning while holding a hyperbolic honeycomb, touching the twists of a torus knot, or caressing the curves of a Klein quartic.

This book is for anyone who wishes to illustrate their mathematical ideas, which in our experience means everyone. It is organized by material, rather than by subject area, and purposefully emphasizes the process of creating things, including discussions of failures that occurred along the way. As a result, the reader can learn from the experiences of those who came before, and will be inspired to create their own illustrations. Topics illustrated within include prime numbers, fractals, the Klein bottle, Borromean rings, tilings, space-filling curves, knot theory, billiards, complex dynamics, algebraic surfaces, groups and prime ideals, the Riemann zeta function, quadratic fields, hyperbolic space, and hyperbolic 3-manifolds. Everyone who opens this book should find a type of mathematics with which they identify. Each contributor explains the mathematics behind their illustration at an accessible level, so that all readers can appreciate the beauty of both the object itself and the mathematics behind it.

A mathematical investigation into every known type of pasta.

Introduced 160 years ago as an attempt to generalize complex numbers to higher dimensions, quaternions are now recognized as one of the most important concepts in modern computer graphics. They offer a powerful way to represent rotations and compared to rotation matrices they use less memory, compose faster, and are naturally suited for efficient interpolation of rotations. Despite this, many practitioners have avoided quaternions because of the mathematics used to understand them, hoping that some day a more intuitive description will be available. The wait is over. Andrew Hanson's new book is a fresh perspective on quaternions. The first part of the book focuses on visualizing quaternions to provide the intuition necessary to use them, and includes many illustrative examples to motivate why they are important—a beautiful introduction to those wanting to explore quaternions unencumbered by their mathematical aspects. The second part covers the all-important advanced applications, including quaternion curves, surfaces, and volumes. Finally, for those wanting the full story of the mathematics behind quaternions, there is a gentle introduction to their four-dimensional nature and to Clifford Algebras, the all-encompassing framework for vectors and quaternions. Richly illustrated introduction for the developer, scientist, engineer, or student in computer graphics, visualization, or entertainment computing. Covers both non-mathematical and mathematical approaches to quaternions.

Geometry, of all the branches of mathematics, is the one that is most easily visualized by making something. However, it is all too easy to reduce it to reams of formulas to memorize and proofs to replicate. This book aims to take geometry back to its practical roots with 3D printed models and puzzles as well as demonstrations with household objects like flashlights and paper towel tubes. This is not a traditional geometry textbook, but rather builds up understanding of geometry concepts while also bringing in elements of concepts normally learned much later. Some of the models are counterintuitive, and figuring out how and why they work will both entertain and give insights. Two final chapters suggesting open-ended projects in astronomy and physics, and art and architecture, allow for deeper understanding and integration of the learning in the rest of the book.

This engaging book presents the essential mathematics needed to describe, simulate, and render a 3D world. Reflecting both academic and in-the-trenches practical experience, the authors teach you how to describe objects and their positions, orientations, and trajectories in 3D using mathematics. The text provides an introduction to mathematics for game designers, including the fundamentals of coordinate spaces, vectors, and matrices. It also covers orientation in three dimensions, calculus and dynamics, graphics, and parametric curves.

This textbook, first published in 2003, emphasises the fundamentals and the mathematics underlying computer graphics. The minimal prerequisites, a basic knowledge of calculus and vectors plus some programming experience in C or C++, make the book suitable for self study or for use as an advanced undergraduate or introductory graduate text. The author gives a thorough treatment of transformations and viewing, lighting and shading models, interpolation and averaging, Bézier curves and B-splines, ray tracing and radiosity, and intersection testing with rays. Additional topics, covered in less depth, include texture mapping and colour theory. The book covers some aspects of animation, including quaternions, orientation, and inverse kinematics, and includes source code for a Ray Tracing software package. The book is intended for use along with any OpenGL programming book, but the crucial features of OpenGL are briefly covered to help readers get up to speed. Accompanying software is available freely from the book's web site.

This volume is based on lectures delivered at the 2022 AMS Short Course “3D Printing: Challenges and Applications” held virtually from January 3–4, 2022. Access to 3D printing facilities is quickly becoming ubiquitous across college campuses. However, while equipment training is readily available, the process of taking a mathematical idea and making it into a printable model presents a big hurdle for most mathematicians. Additionally, there are still many open questions around what objects are possible to print, how to design algorithms for doing so, and what kinds of geometries have desired kinematic properties. This volume is focused on the process and applications of 3D printing for mathematical education, research, and visualization, alongside a discussion of the challenges and open mathematical problems that arise in the design and algorithmic aspects of 3D printing. The articles in this volume are focused on two main topics. The first is to make a bridge between mathematical ideas and 3D visualization. The second is to describe methods and techniques for including 3D printing in mathematical education at different levels— from pedagogy to research and from demonstrations to individual projects. We hope to establish the groundwork for engaged academic discourse on the intersections between mathematics, 3D printing and education.