Lego geometry

As most geeks know, playing with Lego is superb training in math and geometry. Indeed, many schools now explicity offer "Lego and math" classes. When you have to calculate the number and type of bricks necessary to make a weird shape, or when you try to create a curve out of square bricks, you quickly run into concepts like fractions, exponents, and squares, cubes and roots. When I first learned about the idea of logarithmic scale, it made immediate sense -- because I'd once had the same idea while plotting out brick space on a big flat Lego pad.
Now, Andrew Lipson ... this guy's nuts. Though I mean that in a good way. He essentially performs Xtreme math using Lego bricks: He's devoted the last few years to developing Lego models of famous geometric shapes, including the Moebius strip (pictured above), the Moebius-like "Klein Bottle", and the incredibly weird, single-surfaced Bour's surface. Want to build them yourself? Here's how Lipson did it:
OK, I admit it -- these weren't constructed entirely without computer assistance. Usually I write some C code to generate whatever the shape is and figure out which cells in a grid made up of 1x1x1 LEGO bricks should be filled in. The code outputs this as an LDraw .DAT file, separated into construction steps adding one complete layer of the structure in each step. Then I use MLCad to view the .DAT file. I play around with the parameters and repeat until I have something that looks nice and which will probably be able to balance.
Posted by Clive Thompson at July 04, 2003 03:17 PM
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Wow.
I was a LEGO nut back in my early teens (Space Lego was my particular fetish), and must have spent hundreds of hours scratching my way through the suitcase I kept them in, hunting up the perfect piece...drove my family nuts.
But this guy makes me look like a rank amateur.
Good post, Clive.
Posted by: bud at July 5, 2003 2:05 PM
Posted by: Alfred Cloutier at July 6, 2003 7:19 PM
Thats Insane, I myself have tried some simple things like a sphere and failled miserably because my math is hidious. All I really know is that two sideways lego bricks = three stacked ones
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Wow.
I was a LEGO nut back in my early teens (Space Lego was my particular fetish), and must have spent hundreds of hours scratching my way through the suitcase I kept them in, hunting up the perfect piece...drove my family nuts.
But this guy makes me look like a rank amateur.
Good post, Clive.
Posted by: bud at July 5, 2003 2:05 PM
Hehe, I've had that link up on my site for a while. Crazy stuff. Also check out the Demag AC50-1 All Terrain Crane for more "concrete" execution.
Posted by: Alfred Cloutier at July 6, 2003 7:19 PM
Thats Insane, I myself have tried some simple things like a sphere and failled miserably because my math is hidious. All I really know is that two sideways lego bricks = three stacked ones
Posted by: Kevin at November 19, 2003 11:43 AM
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Posted by: julia at January 24, 2004 7:08 PM
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Posted by: Penis Enlargement Pills at February 2, 2005 10:14 PM