Even if math wasn’t one of your best subjects growing up, it can actually be beautiful. While mathematicians may describe theorems as elegant, geometry actually looks very cool. One artist has created a mathematical light installation.
Olafur Eliasson of Berlin dubs his creation “Your Sound Galaxy.” It consists of geometric shapes suspended from the ceiling, rotating slowly like a galaxy.
“It consists of a group of twenty-seven polyhedra suspended from the ceiling and arranged in two horizontally concentric circles,” he told My Modern Metropolis. “The polyhedra are arranged in a clockwise sequence in which each form has more faces than the last. These are organisable into nine ‘families’ of three related forms. Two of the three are dual polyhedra – meaning that the number of vertices on the one polyhedron is equal to the number of faces on the other – and the third, hanging in the inner circle, is a combination of the two.”
If you didn’t understand that, you have to admit that it still looks pretty cool. The shapes use LEDs for the lights, which are fit into the edges. The “sound” part of the title refers not to any sound (it doesn’t have any) but to the composition of the shapes.
If you like this, you might want to check out a post on Batman teaching trigonometry, just in time for “The Dark Knight Rises.” Another interesting geometrical creation that’s shown up in many graphics demos over years is the Newell Teapot.
