But you get too many stitches on the needle. So she quickly realized crochet was the better thing.

And that's exactly what happened when Daina Taimina in 1997, showed that you could crochet models in hyperbolic space.

And the only way that mathematicians know how to model this structure is with crochet. It happens to be a fact.

In 1997 a mathematician at Cornell, Daina Taimina, made the discovery that this structure could actually be done in knitting and crochet.

Just as the morphology and the complexity of life on earth is never ending, little embellishments and complexifications in the DNA code lead to new things like giraffes, or orchids so too, do little embellishments in the crochet code lead to new and wondrous creatures in the evolutionary tree of crochet life.

Margaret Wertheim leads a project to re create the creatures of the coral reefs using a crochet technique invented by a mathematician celebrating the amazements of the reef, and deep diving into the hyperbolic geometry underlying coral creation.

But we found that when we deviated from the specific setness of the mathematical code that underlies it the simple algorithm crochet three, increase one when we deviated from that and made embellishments to the code, the models immediately started to look more natural.

But through this sort of modality, crochet, other plastic forms of play people can be engaged with the most abstract, high powered, theoretical ideas, the kinds of ideas that normally you have to go to university departments to study in higher mathematics, which is where I first learned about hyperbolic space.