Author: Jason

  • The vale of tears that is Mavericks

    So I thought to myself: sure, it’s an Apple update, why not change my machines to 10.9 (“Mavericks”)? This was my entry into the system-administration-hell that is OSX Mavericks. The appeal of OSX for science users was always that it’s a supported hardware platform with the few paid applications that you really need (mainly Mathematica…

  • 3d printable tight knots!

    I just finished uploading a large collection of my tight knots and links to Thingiverse, where they can be downloaded for 3d printing or sent to Shapeways or another service. The ever-awesome Laura Taalman did a bunch of these over the summer, and I was so inspired that ever since I’ve wanted to put the…

  • Unity! (And something amazing from the DoD)

    I’ve now spent a few days rebuilding my web game TaylorTurret in the public game engine Unity. As always, when you finally find the right tool for something, you spend a lot of time wondering why you didn’t do it this way in the first place. This thing is really amazing! It does all the lighting,…

  • Full rendered splendor

    After another couple of days messing about, I finally understand a few more things about LuxRender. 1.) You can’t make a LightSource of type “area”. Despite the fact that this is (ahem) nowhere in the documentation, you have to use AreaLightSource. The AreaLightSource seems to be a LOT less powerful than a “direct” light source,…

  • Victory! (Of a sort)

    So I’ve been working for a few days on understanding LuxRender, which if you’ve never seen it is a quite impressive global illumination renderer. I’ve been trying to piece together a Mathematica interface which will allow me to take quick snaps of tubes, knots, random polygons and the like and been completely befuddled. Aside from…

  • Rendering solution

    So I know I’m dating myself (badly) here, but a lot of my personal art code still relies on PovRay in order to make “nice” renders of things. The problem is that PovRay has been entirely dead for the past six or seven years, and now doesn’t even compile and install on my exciting new…

  • Image for PNAS Special Topology Issue

    I just finished making a small contribution to this image (hopefully to appear on the cover of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) built by Tammy Cantarella and Aaron Abrams. The structure illustrates some of Aaron’s research on Dehn functions. Aaron’s work is way deeper than this example, but the example is still…

  • Solving Mazes by Coloring

    Most people know that you can always solve a maze (eventually) by turning left. Here’s a more visual solution to the maze problem which I developed for a elementary school class at Waseca Montessori School in Athens, Georgia. Instead of thinking about the maze, think about the walls of the maze: if there’s a path…

  • Fold And Cut Puzzles

    Erik Demaine, Marty Demaine, and Anna Lubiw proved the following amazing thing a few years ago: You can fold a piece of paper so that ANY shape with straight edges can be cut out of the paper with a single cut. see Erik’s page on Fold-And-Cut problems to read more about the history of this fact. (Did…

  • Cover of Experimental Mathematics

    Our paper Knot Tightening by Constrained Gradient Descent made the cover of Experimental Mathematics! This picture is the highly symmetric 818 knot which we arrived at with our software Ridgerunner.