Thursday, July 29, 2010

A Non-Math Look at Math Objects

I found out something neat about three-dimensional shapes. Many strange mathematical solids are constructed by rotating the plane of a two-dimensional shape around an imaginary axis. Think of the flat holiday decorations you fold out around its spine/axis. Once I understood what is called a “surface of revolution” in my mind, the construction of many odd mathematical shapes began to make sense. Let's look at a few really strange shapes in this article I wrote for Neatorama.

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