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The PBS series POV is airing a series of animations made from stories told to StoryCorps. You saw the first one here entitled Q&A last spring. The latest story involves Danny Perasa and his wife Annie, who have been in love since 1978. This animation was directed by the Rauch Brothers, on whose blog you'll find more about the work. Warning: this will tug at your heart. You can be the first to see other StoryCorps animations on POV with a schedule posted at StoryCorps. Link -Thanks, Ali!

For many of us, the first time we appreciated the art of math was when we played with a Spirograph. However, it's a long way from addition and subtraction to epicycloids, and very few of us actually study math that far. But those who do sometimes end up creating some very beautiful artworks based on mathematics and geometry.  

Sculpture

Sculptor Bathsheba Grossman creates metal and crystal artworks of forms found in math, physics, biology, and astronomy. Grossmen shows us Borromean rings, hypercubes, gyroids, fractals, Calabi-Yau spaces, and interlaced sculptures based on the five Platonic solids. I particularly like this Voronoi network wrapped onto a Möbius toroid, sculpted in white glass.

Grossman created this beautiful lamp from one of her Ora series sculptures. Available in several lamp styles from Materialise.

Jewelry

The Julia set is a fractal equation that produces a series of rather pleasing spirals. Designer Marc Newson took that fractal shape and designed a necklace of 2,000 diamonds and sapphires that took jewelry craftsmen 1,500 hours to put together. Note that the necklace is not symmetrical, but still has a sense of balance. See how the jeweler, Boucheron, advertises the necklace.

Drawing

Probably the best known artist to use math concepts in his works is M.C. Escher. Many of his 2-dimensional drawings turned 3-dimensional geometry on its head. The lithograph titled Waterfall illustrates the concept of the Penrose triangle, also called the impossible triangle. Escher also explored tessellations in many of his drawings.

Computer Imaging

Paul Nylander was one of the developers of the Mandelbulb that we saw in a previous math post. He is a computer engineer and an artist who renders math and science concepts into colorful images including animated .gifs to help us visualize their 3- or 4-dimensional structures. Shown is a Dodeca-Spidroball, a variation on the spidron, which was invented by Daniel Erdely in 1979.

Belgian mechanical engineer Jos Leys renders and animates all kinds of math concepts into beautiful forms that boggle the mind. His artworks include fractals, Kleinian groups, inversive geometry, recursions, tessellations, knots, and tilings in both images and video renderings to show 3- and 4-dimensional effects. The image above is called Indra200, an example of "Kleinian jewelry". Other artists rendering math images worth checking out include Torolf Sauermann, Brian Johnston, Mehrdad Garousi, and the late Titia Van Beugen.

Video

(YouTube link)

Creating visual representations of math concepts became easier with computer rendering software and digital video capabilities. That doesn't mean it is simple. Homporgo, the artist who created this video of a Mandelbox zoom said in a comment:

Believe me Bill, I wanted to go further too, but at the end part a single frame took 18 minutes to render, and the whole 1:27 minute video needed 12 days nonstop rendering. I felt thats more than enough at the time.

Twelve days! The result looks worth it to me. How about you? See more fractals on video in this post.

Previously at Neatorama: A Non-Math Look at Math Objects and A Non-Math Look at Math Shapes.

Make a cone out of a piece of bread, line it with peanut butter, and top with a scoop of your favorite homemade jelly-flavored ice cream! Grathio Labs has the complete instructions. Once you get the cone made, the rest is simple. Link -via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

The first Fill in the Bubble Frenzy with boy genius Mal and his talking dog Chad last week had a great reception -98 comments! Let's see how you fill in the empty speech bubble this week. The best entry will win any T-shirt available in the NeatoShop -take a look around, pick one out and tell us what shirt you’d like with your submission in the comments. Enter as many times as you like, but leave only one entry per comment, please. Even if you have no idea what he's saying, check out the other entries! Also check out Mal and Chad’s comic strip adventures by Stephen McRanie at malandchad.com.

Update: We have a winner! Noah didn't use words, but he filled in the bubble. See his entry here.

Sometimes it's hard to tell from a musical act's name whether it refers to a person or the band as a whole. If you know, you'll ace today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. It's harder than you might think, as the acts span many years. I scored 100% but that's only because I spent decades in broadcasting. Link

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Have you ever thought about building your own claw game? Winning is easier when you don't have to feed money into the machine! Will Gorman was inspired by Toy Story to construct one for his son out of Lego bricks. The complete instructions are posted at BattleBricks. Link

This detail won't give you much of a clue about the picture at NeatoGeek, but if you can come up with something awesome to say about it, you could win a free t-shirt from the NeatoShop in NeatoGeek's new caption contest. Be sure to put your t-shirt choice in your comment along with the caption. I can't wait to see what you creative folks come up with! http://www.neatorama.com/neatogeek/2010/08/17/caption-contest-7/

New York illustrator Christoph Niemann took a flight from New York to Berlin and documented the absurdities of airline travel in pictures in his blog at The New York Times. I honestly love the idea of a "delete neighbor" button. Link

Urban explorer Kyle Merriman, who brought us pictures of Nara Dreamland, has a new collection of photographs from an abandoned hospital in Tainan, Taiwan.

As we entered it was clear we weren’t the first visitors it had received. Prescription drugs, lay scattered across tables and floors, while others remained unopened. Broken syringes crunched underfoot and bottles of formaldehyde still kept their mysterious contents. The wind followed us inside, slamming random doors and causing the peeling wallpaper to dance. It was a spooky place to say the least.

http://www.brandknewme.com/?p=958

NeatoBambino has the new Decipher the Doodle contest up! Take a look at a drawing from Alex and Tiffany's four-year-old, and see if you can figure out what she is trying to illustrate. The commenter with most correct answer and another with the funniest answer will each win a prize (worth $25 or less) of their choice from the NeatoShop. Just be sure to state your preferred prize with your comment. This illustration is only a small detail of the doodle. Good luck! Link

While you're at NeatoBambino, take some time to join in the discussion about Pediatricians and their Questions. Link

Thailand has "panda fever", much like the panda mania that swept the US a few years ago. But American zoos never painted other animals to look like pandas! Thailand's Chiang Mai Zoo has a pair of pandas on loan from China who produced a baby named Lin Ping. The birth doubled the zoo's attendance and revenues, causing other zoos to jump on the panda bandwagon.

At several sites across the country, commercial aquariums and animal parks are painting their animals in panda colors to keep up visitor numbers in the face of tougher competition -- as well as educate people about the threats elephants and crocodiles face in the wild.

Mr. Kamla, a 25-year-old crocodile-handler, fielded a barrage of questions from schoolchildren recently at Buengchawark Underwater Sea Paradise as he and a colleague painted a three-month-old Siamese crocodile in panda colors.

"They're an endangered species, too, like the panda, so we hope some of our knowledge will trickle down," Mr. Kamla says.

Prasit Vejprasit, an administrator at the aquarium, says busloads of schoolchildren -- the mainstay of the aquarium's business -- continue coming to the site, a couple of hours' travel northwest of Bangkok, encouraged in large part by the panda-colored crocs. He says teachers often call to confirm the aquarium is still painting crocodiles before sending their classes.

The children seem to enjoy the novelty. "Most crocodiles are scary but this one is cute," says Siripob Dara, 9 years old, before he asks Mr. Kamla how long it can grow and what it eats.

Link -via Dark Roasted Blend

(Image credit: James Hookway/The Wall Street Journal)

Previously at Neatorama: Panda-painted Elephants

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Get a closer look at how Maru does his thing with boxes. This is almost hypnotizing. -via The Litter Box

The wooden shoe is symbolic of the Dutch for many of us, but how did they come about, and why? The shoes have several advantages, including one illustrated by a Jackie Chan video in this post at Rue the Day. Link

See lots of pictures of cats in their best finery, plus a link to outtakes from the cat fashion show last week at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City. The occasion was the 15th birthday of the official hotel cat Matilda. Link -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Katie Sokoler/Gothamist)

If you or your children are tired of supermarket coloring books and their generic designs, or if you yourself like to doodle with color, try something a little more interesting. Illustrator Carlton Hibbert has a collection of artistic patterns that you can download, print, and color. Quite a few artists and illustrators have contributed to the collection, and all patterns are licensed under Creative Commons, which means you can use them freely. Link