Skip to main content

Lasagne with a Twist

Ruled surfaces have the property that any point on the surface is a part of a line in the 3D space that is also wholly contained in that surface. The constraint of having the entire surface made up of straight lines may make it seem like the only possible surface is a plane, but many curved surfaces can be made from straight lines. Some examples are cylinders, cones, and hyperboloids of one sheet. In fact, all three of these surfaces can be made by drawing lines between two circles where one is directly above the other. The type of surface obtained depends on the difference in degrees between the points on the circles that make up the lines on the surface. Helixes and double helixes are also ruled surfaces because they are composed of a straight line rotating around a point as it goes upwards. There are many other uniquely shaped ruled surfaces, but the one I created has to do with sine waves and pasta.
  The two functions I chose to make a ruled surface from were a sine wave going along the x axis and a sine wave going along the y axis. The specific parameterizations were \[x(t)=0, y(t)=t, z(t)=-10*\cos(20*t)\] \[x(t)=t, y(t)=0, z(t)=10*\cos(20*t)\] When shown as a surface, it looks like a lasagne sheet twisted 180 degrees in the middle.
When shown as a handful of lines making up the surface, you can see that the lines wobble back and forth before doing a complete 180 and then continuing to wobble.
My lasagne also has some interesting properties. Although it is not a doubly ruled surface (where every point has two lines on the surface that go through it), an additional line, \(y=x\), lies on the surface. This line was not created from drawing a line between the two curves, but it is still an extra line that is contained on the curved surface. Another interesting property is that as the lines in the surface get further from the middle, their slope approaches zero because the sine waves get further and further apart, but still have the same difference in height. Also, if you were to graph the slope of the lines, the graph would go back and forth between positive and negative with its amplitude getting bigger as it approaches zero, and then the slope suddenly has an infinite discontinuity at zero before returning to going back and forth between positive and negative.
  The reason I chose these curves was because the surface made from them reminded me of my favorite fictional cat's meal of choice. Garfield the cat loves lasagna. I love Garfield. Therefore, by the transitive property, I love lasagna. I don't know how to make an entire dish of lasagna from straight lines though, so I decided to go with a lasagne sheet instead. A simple lasagne sheet was too ordinary, though. I wanted it to have some sort of twist. So I gave it one. The resulting surface was lasagne with a twist. I'm sure that if Jon Arbuckle served Garfield lasagna made with my twisted lasagne sheets, that orange cat would be amazed at the mathematical properites of the food he was eating.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Do Over: Integration Over a Region in a Plane

Throughout the semester we have covered a variety of topics and how their mathematical orientation applies to real world scenarios. One topic we discussed, and I would like to revisit, is integration over a region in a plane which involves calculating a double integral. Integrating functions of two variables allows us to calculate the volume under the function in a 3D space. You can see a more in depth description and my previous example in my blog post, https://ukyma391.blogspot.com/2021/09/integration-for-over-regions-in-plane_27.html . I want to revisit this topic because in my previous attempt my volume calculations were incorrect, and my print lacked structural stability. I believed this print and calculation was the topic I could most improve on and wanted to give it another chance. What needed Improvement? The function used previously was f(x) = cos(xy) bounded on [-3,3] x [-1,3]. After solving for the estimated and actual volume, it was difficult to represent in a print...

Minimal Surfaces

Minimum surfaces can be described in many equivalent ways. Today, we are going to focus on minimum surfaces by defining it using curvature. A surface is a minimum surface if and only if the mean curvature at every point is zero. This means that every point on the surface is a saddle point with equal and opposite curvature allowing the smallest surface area possible to form. Curvature helps define a minimal surface by looking at the normal vector. For a surface in R 3 , there is a tangent plane at each point. At each point in the surface, there is a normal vector perpendicular to the tangent plane. Then, we can intersect any plane that contains the normal vector with the surface to get a curve. Therefore, the mean curvature of a surface is defined by the following equation. Where theta is an angle from a starting plane that contains the normal vector. For this week’s project, we will be demonstrating minimum surfaces with a frame and soap bubbles! How It Works Minimum surfac...

Do Over: Ruled Surfaces

Why to choose this project to repeat For the do over project, I would like to choose the ruled surfaces. I don't think my last project was creative, and the 3D printed effect was not very satisfactory. In the previous attempts, all the lines are connected between a straight line and a circle. This connection structure is relatively uncomplicated. The printed model has too many lines, resulting in too dense line arrangement. The gaps between lines are too small, and the final effect is that all the lines are connected into a curved surface, which is far from the effect I expected. What to be improved In this do over project, I would like to improve in two aspects. Firstly, a different ruled surface is chosen. In the previous model, one curve is a unit circle on the \(x-y\) plane, and the ruled surface is a right circular conoid. In this do over project, it is replaced by two border lines. Each borderline is in the shape of an isosceles right triangl...