Thursday, January 5, 2012

Natural Geometry

Mathematically beautiful. I woke up one rainy morning a few months ago and saw this on a bush next to my back porch. It caught my eye for obvious reasons. So many questions came to mind. I've seen spider webs before, and while they're fascinating to look at and to think about, this one was different. I've never seen one in a nearly-perfect parabola/cone shape before. Its times like this that I wish I would've stopped to take some measurements or had all of my students standing next to me. This could've been (well, I guess it still could be) a great exploration of paraboloas and calculus. I'm just glad I stopped to take a picture. When I got home it was no more.
And how the heck does it appear to be levitating?

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