Le Topologicon

Le Topologicon is a great comic book about topology. The author is Jean-Pierre Petit who discovered the first parameterization of the boy surface in 1981. He is also the co-founder of the non-profit organization Savoir-sans-frontiers. The book deals with moebius strips, klein bottles, boy surfaces, magnetic fields, surface stiching and a lot more interesting topics. In my opinion, the Topologicon is a must-read for everyone dealing with surface modelling, mesh modelling, subdivision surfaces, surface tesselation, vector fields, deformations, or topological space. Some example pages:

More Geodesic Shells

Mårten Nettelbladt kindly adviced me of the Korkeasaari Lookout Tower, an example of a geodesic structure build of wood.

The Japan Pavillion at the expo 2000 by Shigeru Ban and Frei Otto is an example of an geodesic shell build of paper tubes.

Geodesic Shell

The structure of this shell is woven from isocurves and geodesic curves on a surface. Geodesic curves are also called plank lines, they can be build from straigth, but twisted planks. Mårten Nettelbladt studied them on his blog. Geodesic shells build in wood have been studied at the laboratory for timber construction of the EPFL.

Planks generated from lines on a surface with this script: TwistedBeams.zip


The (straight) bamboo strips of this chinese hat are following geodesic lines. Photo by drs2biz.

Surface Turtle

This is an implementation of a turtle walking around on a NURBS surface. If the turtle is going straight in small steps, the resulting path is close to a geodesic.

SurfaceTurtle.zip

In general relativity, the straight path in curved spacetime is a geodesic