Event Description:
Weaving, braiding and plaiting can be counted as one of the oldest cultural techniques belonging to human culture, much older than agriculture or writing. While the historical research, starting already from ancient Greece, shows an abundance of approaches towards the mathematics of weaving and braiding, contemporary research points that this interweaving between the two domains is still far from being completely understood. How did (and do) weaving practices and artisanal knowledge of weaving lead to the rise of arithmetical and geometrical thinking during the centuries? How can ethnomathematics and new design techniques help us uncover implicitly mathematical structures within woven and string figures? How can wrinkled and buckled textiles be mathematically modeled, and which function would such a model have?
The conference aims to address these questions, to show that there is an intricate and complicated relationship between mathematics and weaving, starting already in antiquity and continuing until today. It will take not only consider antiquity, but also the novel approaches to mathematics of weaving of the 21st century, in order to shed new light on ancient traditions, but also to inquire about the emergence of new epistemic techniques in mathematics.
Event Speakers:
Please visit the event webpage for full speaker list.
Event Information:
Free and open to the public, registration is required. Please email michael.friedman [at] hu-berlin.de to RSVP.
Hosted by Matters of Activity at Humboldt University of Berlin.
