Intro
I have been intrigued by patterns since a young age. When I was 8, I was mowing the lawn at my family’s house and was fascinated by the pattern between the cut and uncut grass. In graduate school, my first introduction to dynamical systems came from a lecture by Bob Devaney on the fractal patterns in the Julia sets arising from complex dynamics, go to my page.
My Story with Triangle
My obsession with the educational possibilities of the Sierpinski triangle started when I was working with teachers in a HHMI funded summer institute where they had the teachers create a multi-level Sierpinski triangle out of paper. Then with my children, I discovered that we could make the same triangles out of plastic K’NEX pieces. From this experience grew the dream of creating the world’s largest Sierpinski Triangle out of K’NEX pieces; a dream that was realized on April 25, 2016 when the Wagner Free Institute of Science invited me to be Mathematician in Residence as part of the Philadelphia Science Festival.
Sierpinski Triangle at Bryn Mawr
First we did a “pre-build” at Bryn Mawr College where we constructed 1/3 of the full Sierpinski triangle. Then we did the full build of the 90 ft x 45 ft big Sierpinski triangle at the Wagner Institute. (there were color pics from the radio show/newspaper The Pulse: new carousel; include pics and video). We recreated the full Sierpinski triangle a few weeks later back on the Bryn Mawr athletic field (more pics, video).
