Her videos, the last 2 external links on Wikipedia, are excellent introductions indeed. She even recreates the history of how they originated
> The discovery of the first flexagon, a trihexaflexagon, is credited to the British mathematician Arthur H. Stone, while a student at Princeton University in the United States in 1939. His new American paper would not fit in his English binder so he cut off the ends of the paper and began folding them into different shapes.
Her video is an animation of a Martin Gardner "Mathematical Games" article that kicked off the craze. It's been published in a few of his books of article collections.
And I want to encourage everyone to try their hand at making one of these. They're deceptively more interesting than they would appear to be at first glance.
And plus-one on the recommendations for Vi Hart's videos on Hexaflexagons also mentioned here.
I have never been less enlightened by a wikipedia page. Some youtube videos cleared up at least the mechanics of the basic versions, but what it means to have the various higher order flexagons is completely mysterious to me even having read this page.
My 7th grade science teacher (hi Mrs. Ericson!) had us make tetratetraflexagons in 1998 and I thought, literally until today, that she had made up that word. She also has us make science-themed dodecahedrons so I guess I should have been clued into the fact that she secretly loved geometry / topology.
I made a tetratetraflexagon for my wedding program. I ended up making a script to use ImageMagick to convert four images into two images suitable for printing on both sides of an 8.5"x11" sheet of paper. The scripts, example images, and instructions are here:
I did notice the link was broken, but didn't want to wait until I had time to fix it before commenting. I've fixed it and a couple of other ones. Thanks.
I immediately thought of those videos when I read the title, but somehow she is missing from the wiki page, even though there is a section on popular culture.
> Cool thing about wiki is that you can edit it! That way the next person to read it gets the benefit of your knowledge.
Only if they're lucky to arrive in the narrow window between you making your edit and it getting reverted by the power user squatting the page. In practice you can't really edit wikipedia unless you put a lot of time and effort into getting good at wikipedia politics.
This is not true in my experience; you can make a wide range of possible edits without being reverted. Knowing which ones those are requires a good understanding of Wikipedia policy, not its politics. (There is politics, but it's not like every edit is a battle of minds.)
You'd need to read up on the notability guidelines and find a secondary source to figure whether you can make this edit stick. Though then again, there's often no "power user squatting the page" of any kind, so it might not be reverted even if you fail to adhere to this.
Before clicking I thought it was about flexhedra, but I got confused. But since there is seemingly no Wikipedia page for it here is a French video (subtitled, hopefully with a high enough quality) describing it briefly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg3_gLO-reE
39 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 997 ms ] thread> The discovery of the first flexagon, a trihexaflexagon, is credited to the British mathematician Arthur H. Stone, while a student at Princeton University in the United States in 1939. His new American paper would not fit in his English binder so he cut off the ends of the paper and began folding them into different shapes.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Martin%20Gardner%20%22Mathem...
[1] http://geofhagopian.net/papers/GARDNER01.pdf
Looks delicious! I'm looking forward to trying this sometime.
https://www.amazon.de/M-C-Escher-Kaleidozyklen-Taschen-speci...
And I want to encourage everyone to try their hand at making one of these. They're deceptively more interesting than they would appear to be at first glance.
And plus-one on the recommendations for Vi Hart's videos on Hexaflexagons also mentioned here.
It's different than a "cootie catcher."
https://www.timpark.org/making-a-tetratetraflexagon/
https://kellianderson.com/blog/2011/10/11/talks-and-a-recurs...
The concept is one thing but the execution takes it to another level.
https://youtu.be/thOifuHs6eY?si=S93Rm1e1EDWmOSUd
Only if they're lucky to arrive in the narrow window between you making your edit and it getting reverted by the power user squatting the page. In practice you can't really edit wikipedia unless you put a lot of time and effort into getting good at wikipedia politics.
You'd need to read up on the notability guidelines and find a secondary source to figure whether you can make this edit stick. Though then again, there's often no "power user squatting the page" of any kind, so it might not be reverted even if you fail to adhere to this.
> m including Vi Hart reference [0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Flexagon&diff=pre...