Shirts in lectures!

All the hexagons that Madeleine and I cut out during the Stitch Lounge have now been assembled into their patchwork form! I have to thank my friends who’ve been putting up with me doing sewing at every social event, and the television series Castle for providing me with many hours of entertainment whilst stitching. A photo of the final finished piece will have to wait until the exhibition!

Now it’s time for me to get started on the heptagons for our hyperbolic shirt…

In other news, I got to use our Klein Bottle shirt design to make an emergency Klein Bottle for a lecture yesterday. Undergraduate students were learning how to construct new topological spaces from old ones, and one example of this is that you can construct a Klein Bottle by gluing the edges of a square in a particular way.

Glue the two red sides (arrows matching) to get a cylinder, then match the blue sides & arrows to get a Klein Bottle

From these instructions it’s pretty hard to see what a Klein Bottle could look like, but it can easily be made with a shirt by turning one sleeve inside out, passing through the front of the shirt and then pinning the two cuffs together. Great to see that The Mathematician’s Shirts is having a good effect on my teaching as well as on my stitching abilities!