Thursday, February 09, 2017

Jitterbug Transformation


Your math teacher may use the Jitterbug Transformation to help explain how the cuboctahedron and icosahedron layers might morph into one another without gaining or losing constituent balls.

1, 12, 42, 92, 162... is the sequence we're talking about.

Geometrical concepts may be imparted via a number of these moving sculptures, or dynamic devices.

Another such device is the triangular book with one triangular page, its tip traveling in a 180 degree arc and defining two complementary tetrahedrons (same volume as each other) all along the way.

When the page is straight up, and the edges are all 2, we call that unit volume in the XYZ coordinate system, made from cubes of edges 1.  These two sculptures have the same volume.

The Quadray coordinate system apparatus gives us yet another conversation piece with which to leverage greater understanding of the target namespace.  Again, the canonical edges (not base vectors) are of edges 2.

Our World Game Museum will feature a lot of textbooks that saw fit to not include any of this information, nor the related whole number volumes schema.

Probing questions will be posed, and documentary postmortems invited.  People will come up with varying theories to explain the censoring habits of minions.

Transformation