George Hart is a professor in engineering and a freelance mathematical sculptor, designer and artist. With the basis in mathematics, he creates stunning sculptures in a variety of materials and sizes, in principle, based on basic polyhedra. But his sculptures are anything but basic.

The fact that this shape ….

can turn into this, delights me no end.

This is the incredibly beautiful Frabjous, made in laser-cut aspen. I would love to have the money to get pieces laser-cut, and stick light inside it. It would make for interesting light-shadows, and that in turn would be an interesting still life for pencil drawings. Art is always multilayered.

I have recreated this, in corrugated cardboard, as he generously provides some of the templates on his gallery page. I suspect this is one of the easier ones, but I assure you: cutting out 30 pieces of this shape is far from easy. My fingers hurt for a month. And assembling it was actually tricky, based only on the photographs on his Frabjous page. With corrugated cardboard and paper glue there is a limit to how many times the cock-up fairy can visit, before the ends of the pieces no longer are glueable. I am pretty useless at math, a little better at 3D I can touch; but what saved the project was my visual sense for more or less abstract shape. There will be a post with more of my adventure into polyhedra. In the meantime, you can dip a little into Platonic solids, which are the basis for many of these wonderful sculptures.

Besides, putting my cardboard Frabjous next to his gorgeous aspen one would just be depressing :)

I recreated the template in a vector format and adjusted both ends to be exactly identical. If it is ok with George Hart, I will link to a downloadable vector eps file. I will ask, and we shall see.

I have asked him nicely if he could provide the template for the sculpture The Triangles Which Aren’t There, and with luck I will be able to create one. I have tried a few others, but it seems that my pieces are too small. Corrugated cardboard are too thick for the maximum size I can get from my decimated cardboard boxes.

Here are a few of his sculptures. I would love to try Snarl, Compass points and the Bathysphere, but suspect it is beyond my resources.

All images from George Harts  gallery page.