Bready or not, here we crumb! Oftentimes, we forget the relationship between everyday math and the other creations of the world. Our project highlights that while there is also an immense amount of diversity, math exists everywhere and we can now use technology to present this information in a visual context. For the final project, our group became interested in presenting breads from a variety of different cultures by using what we have learned throughout this semester about analyzing distinct shapes and modeling them through Mathematica. As our group is ethnically diverse, we thought it would be really interesting to incorporate some aspects of our culture into this project. In addition, we hoped to learn about other cultures through the course of this project. Bread, as a simple yet adaptable recipe that allows for many variations, seemed to be an interesting choice by which we could learn more about how different countries and cultures made the concept their own.
Think our jokes are getting stale yet? Wait till you get a loaf of our buns! Bread can also be customized in its form, which would allow us to explore modeling a variety of different shapes in Mathematica; among the shapes we determined we would use to create these breads are spheres, disks, ellipsoids, and other, more complex shapes such as a knot or a torus. The different breads we looked into include Jamaican dumplings, bagels (Jewish), pretzels (German), naan (Indian), and samosas (Indian). While some shapes are more straightforward, such as the spherical dumplings, the varying forms of breads such as the samosas and the pretzel allowed for more interesting models on Mathematica. The project incorporated comands on Mathematica that we learned throughout the semester during lab as well as in class. We used commands we learned such as ParametricPlot3D[] and used parameters indicative the variety of shapes we covered (i.e. ellipsoids), learned how to vary the colors of our models, and even incorporated new commands such as Block[].
