The series of UK lockdowns gave me a great opportunity to get through my list of books I didn't think I had time for, during which I came across a story about one Daina Taimiņa, a Latvian mathematician. Inspired by William Thurston’s work on hyperbolic planes in the 1960s, Daina combined her passion for mathematics and her love of crochet and embarked on a quest through the world of hyperbolic planes, stitch by stitch. Hyperbolic planes fall under the domain of hyperbolic geometry, a fascinating area of non-Euclidean mathematics. Granted, it’s quite the mouthful so perhaps imagine instead the crinkling of lettuce leaves and jellyfish tentacles, or for the physicists amongst you, consider the theory of special relativity, Minkowski spacetime and gyrovector space; hyperbolic planes can be found in them all. In essence, these planes are surfaces with constant negative curvature and Daina was on a mission to model them with yarn.
At first, she increased stitches in a constant ratio of 1:2, i.e. after every two stitches, she increased by one. The rows grew exponentially and resulted in a very ruffled hyperbolic crochet plane. She then examined the effects of changing the increase ratio. This was only the beginning of a new path in her career as her captivating crocheted creations caught the attention of the science community and the media. In fact, her way of exploring hyperbolic space via crochet has been adopted by several science communicators and has been used as a tool to combat math-phobia. Often the rigid and prescribed route through schools and exam boards can put somewhat of a stopper on creativity especially for STEM students, despite the fact that science is inextricably linked with innovation and originality. Daina’s “Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes” (also the title of her book) is an essential reminder that art is very much alive and well in mathematics and science and that the combination of both can lead to trailblazing results.
Feeling motivated after reading Daina’s story despite the announcement that the first UK lockdown would be extended, The Crochet Collective was born. Over a virtual tea and cake, we founded this business and established our aim to deliver high-quality, bespoke and ethical clothing to our customers whilst maintaining a no plastic policy in the supply chain.
In an email correspondence with Daina, I asked whether there are any shapes that are impossible to crochet and was happy to hear that theoretically any 3D form can be crocheted, with feasibility being the only limit; not all surfaces will hold their shape so various support structures need to be integrated to make it a reality. So keep an eye out because some mesmerising hyperbolic planes might make it into The Crochet Collective’s Summer collection!
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