Karen Daniels, a physicist at North Carolina State University, had tweeted notice of the meet-up earlier that day: “Are you a physicist into knitting, crocheting, or other fiber arts?” she asked. “I’ll be the one knitting a torus.” (A torus is a mathematized doughnut; hers was inspired by a figure in a friend’s scientific paper.)
At the bar, amid tables cluttered with balls of yarn, Dr. Daniels absorbed design advice from a group of specialized knitters, among them Elisabetta Matsumoto, an applied mathematician and physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a co-host of the gathering.
For Dr. Matsumoto, knitting is more than a handicraft hobby with health benefits. She is embarking on a five-year project, “What a Tangled Web We Weave,” funded by the National Science Foundation, to investigate the mathematics and mechanics of “the ancient technology known as knitting.”Some of the oldest examples date to the 11th century B.C.E. in Egypt. But despite generations of practical and experiential knowledge, the physical and mathematical properties of knitted fabric rarely are studied in a way that produces predictive models about how such fabrics behave.
Dr. Matsumoto argues that “knitting is coding” and that yarn is a programmable material. The potential dividends of her research range from wearable electronics to tissue scaffolding.
During the happy-hour meetup, she knitted a swatch illustrating a plastic surgery technique called Z-plasty. The swatch was for a talk she would deliver at 8 a.m. on Wednesday morning called “Twisted Topological Tangles.” Scores of physicists turned up, despite a competing parallel session on “The Extreme Mechanics of Balloons.”
“I’ve been knitting since I was a kid,” Dr. Matsumoto told her (mostly male) audience. “That was the thing I did to get along with my mom when I was a teenager. It’s just been a dream to take all of this stuff that I learned and played with as a child and turn it into something scientifically rigorous.”
As a first step, her team is enumerating all possible knittable stitches: “We know there’s going to be uncountably many, there’s going to be a countably infinite number. How to classify them is what we are working on now.”
The investigation is informed by the mathematical tradition of knot theory. A knot is a tangled circle — a circle embedded with crossings that cannot be untangled. (A circle with no crossings is an “unknot.”)
“The knitted stitch is a whole series of slipknots, one after the other,” said Dr. Matsumoto. Rows and columns of slipknots form a lattice pattern so regular that it is analogous to crystal structure and crystalline materials.
By way of knot theory, Dr. Matsumoto essentially is developing a knit theory: an alphabet of unit-cell stitches, a glossary of stitch combinations, and a grammar governing the knitted geometry and topology — the fabric’s stretchiness, or its “emergent elasticity.” (...)
Dr. Matsumoto’s presentation opened a three-hour session entitled “Fabrics, Knits and Knots” — the first time that the subject had been addressed at the American Physical Society’s annual meeting. (...)
Derek Moulton, of the University of Oxford, mentioned variants of sailor’s knots, DNA and protein knots, and worms that tie themselves into knots in order to minimize dehydration. He went on discuss “whether a knotted filament with zero points of self-contact may be realized physically.” That is, can a knot exist wherein none of its crossings touch? (It can; try it at home with a strip of paper, or a cord.)
And Thomas Plumb-Reyes, an applied physicist at Harvard, presented his research on “Detangling Hair” to a standing-room-only audience.
“What is going on in tangled hair?” he asked. “What is the optimal combing strategy?”
Shashank Markande, a Ph.D. student working with Dr. Matsumoto, reported on their stitch classification work so far. Together, they had derived a conjecture: All knittable stitches must be ribbon knots. (A ribbon knot is a very technical tangle.) And they pondered the corollary: Are all ribbon knots knittable?
Back in February, Mr. Markande (who started knitting only recently for the sake of science) thought he’d found an example of an unknittable ribbon knot, using a knots-and-links software program called SnapPy. He sent Dr. Matsumoto a text message with a sketch: “Tell me if this can be knitted?”
Dr. Matsumoto was just heading out for a run, and by the time she returned, having manipulated the yarn every which way in her head, she had worked out an answer. “I think that can be knitted,” she texted back. When Mr. Markande pressed her on how, she added: “It’s knittable by our rules, but it isn’t trivial to do with needles.”
Mr. Markande said later, “I was pretty surprised. With my limited knowledge, I thought it could not be knitted. But Sabetta managed to knit it.”
“The knitted stitch is a whole series of slipknots, one after the other,” said Dr. Matsumoto. Rows and columns of slipknots form a lattice pattern so regular that it is analogous to crystal structure and crystalline materials.
By way of knot theory, Dr. Matsumoto essentially is developing a knit theory: an alphabet of unit-cell stitches, a glossary of stitch combinations, and a grammar governing the knitted geometry and topology — the fabric’s stretchiness, or its “emergent elasticity.” (...)
Dr. Matsumoto’s presentation opened a three-hour session entitled “Fabrics, Knits and Knots” — the first time that the subject had been addressed at the American Physical Society’s annual meeting. (...)
Derek Moulton, of the University of Oxford, mentioned variants of sailor’s knots, DNA and protein knots, and worms that tie themselves into knots in order to minimize dehydration. He went on discuss “whether a knotted filament with zero points of self-contact may be realized physically.” That is, can a knot exist wherein none of its crossings touch? (It can; try it at home with a strip of paper, or a cord.)
And Thomas Plumb-Reyes, an applied physicist at Harvard, presented his research on “Detangling Hair” to a standing-room-only audience.
“What is going on in tangled hair?” he asked. “What is the optimal combing strategy?”
Shashank Markande, a Ph.D. student working with Dr. Matsumoto, reported on their stitch classification work so far. Together, they had derived a conjecture: All knittable stitches must be ribbon knots. (A ribbon knot is a very technical tangle.) And they pondered the corollary: Are all ribbon knots knittable?
Back in February, Mr. Markande (who started knitting only recently for the sake of science) thought he’d found an example of an unknittable ribbon knot, using a knots-and-links software program called SnapPy. He sent Dr. Matsumoto a text message with a sketch: “Tell me if this can be knitted?”
Dr. Matsumoto was just heading out for a run, and by the time she returned, having manipulated the yarn every which way in her head, she had worked out an answer. “I think that can be knitted,” she texted back. When Mr. Markande pressed her on how, she added: “It’s knittable by our rules, but it isn’t trivial to do with needles.”
Mr. Markande said later, “I was pretty surprised. With my limited knowledge, I thought it could not be knitted. But Sabetta managed to knit it.”
by Siobhan Roberts, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Johnathon Kelso for The New York Times
