ursula: Sheep knitting, from the Alice books (sheep)
Ursula ([personal profile] ursula) wrote2019-01-29 10:17 pm

three long-standing interests

Interests meme from [personal profile] bluebaron. Comment if you'd like me to choose interests for you to write about?

calabi-yau manifolds

These are the thing I research! They're particular higher-dimensional spaces that are flat in the sense that if you were inside one you would experience no gravitational force, but are curled in on themselves in complicated ways. Here's the picture everyone uses, and here's a slice I generated using a different equation. Calabi is the Italian mathematician who conjectured that these spaces should exist. Yau (my mathematical grandfather) proved they actually do.

medieval knitting

I've done a lot of knitting based on medieval objects (or seventeenth-century patterns), over the years. It's usually in the round, and finer than a lot of modern work. Here's my current project:

sion hawk bag

Those are size 1 needles (that my friend [twitter.com profile] vandyhall made out of brass rod), so it's fairly small knitting, though not nearly as tiny as the original, which is a silk relic pouch preserved in a church in Switzerland.

onomastics

This is the fancy way of saying "the study of names". What interests me about studying names is less the individual names, and more the fact that thinking about names in different times and places provides an excuse to learn about languages, culture, and the way they interact. I'm particularly nerdy about classical Greek and Roman and medieval Turkic/Turkish and Mongolian names, though I've picked up all sorts of things, over the years.
bluebaron: James Kinchloe from Hogan's Heroes with a skeptical look on his face (kinch)

[personal profile] bluebaron 2019-01-30 03:38 am (UTC)(link)
this is very cool! (I also am interested superficially in onomastics on a language level, so I was interested to see what drew you to it.)

That knitting looks really nice too. Do you chart your own patterns on a spreadsheet, or do you use a program of some sort?

My math experience is too limited to really understand everything about your research, but they're very pretty slices! Thank you for sharing. :g:
bluebaron: Adrian Hollice from Tanya Huff's Valor series. He is in profile looking at a set of dog tags. (Default)

[personal profile] bluebaron 2019-01-30 05:24 am (UTC)(link)
Oh, rad! I think I'll have to see if I can get my hands on that book at some point, maybe via the college library. (I've charted patterns in Excel before, which is a little tedious, haha.)