Communications of the ACM
Researchers Discover Thousands of Transformable Knots
Researchers discovered thousands of new transformable knots, including three novel shapes that the humble figure-eight knot can assume, doubling the number documented to date in scientific literature.
Credit: www.animatedknots.com
Researchers in Switzerland, the U.S., and Canada discovered thousands of new transformable knots via a computational pipeline combining randomized spatial sampling and physics modeling to efficiently pinpoint the knots' stable equilibrium states.
The researchers produced a vast dataset of multi-stable knots by tapping results from knot theory and processing thousands of different topological knot types through the pipeline.
Explained Michele Vidulis at Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), "By applying a series of filters to this data, we discovered new transformable knots with interesting physical properties and beautiful geometric forms."
Further cross-type analysis yielded geometric and topological patterns with constructive precepts not previously encountered in tabulated knot types, demonstrating the potential application of multi-stable elastic knots in new structure design.
From EPFL (Switzerland)
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Abstracts Copyright © 2023 SmithBucklin, Washington, D.C., USA
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