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Mathematics is all around us
By Tommaso Dorigo | September 27th 2009 09:57 AM | 6 comments | Print | E-mail | Track Comments
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About Tommaso Dorigo

I am an experimental particle physicist working with the CMS experiment at CERN and the CDF experiment at Fermilab. In my spare time I play chess, abuse the piano, and aim my dobson telescope at... Full Bio

Mathematical functions are all around us. We may not realize it but they are there! Check it out on the pictures below.

A blade of light, selected by the venetian blinds of my living room window, draws a curved, complicated, multiple-valued function on the semi-transparent orange curtains. Maybe the curve below is even more fascinating:

And this is only what we observe macroscopically... By examining the boundary of the illuminated regions, we would detect the diffraction pattern of the blind, which would be described by an even more fascinating function. But that is matter for a separate post...

Comments

Hi Tommaso,

To me this is very fascinating to observe such geometrics in the natural settings. I look forward to your mathematical descriptions to learn.

Best,

Plato (not verified) | 09/27/09 | 15:55 PM
When young in my room I was fascinated not by the real diffraction pattern but by the fake ones, such as the "moire effect" and all these bands of dark and light you get when you put two grids of different sizes. There was one very intriguing, produced by a wall of bricks in the building next to my window, which when passing across two or three parallel slits was able to produce a pattern very similar to interference waves. For some weeks I wondered if it was so, until I noticed the regular rows of bricks shinning under the sun.

Alejandro Rivero (not verified) | 09/28/09 | 04:45 AM
T- these always fascinate me too -- but i would much like to know the actual function described by the curve. Do you, or any of your very sharp readers, have any idea how to possibly go about parameterizing it (since it's a double valued funct, it's probably easiest described in parameterized form, i imagine). cheers, M

Mandeep (not verified) | 09/30/09 | 15:17 PM
dorigo's picture
Well, I guess one could construct an expression for the family of functions that may result by the intersection between the plane formed by the blade of light with the curve made by a wound-up curtain. Then one has to parametrize the distortion of the projection of those functions due to the observing angle.
For the wound-up curtain I think there has to be a simple parametrization, because after all it's physics: elastic bands behave similarly. I would also like to know if any reader knows how to express that simply.

Cheers,
T.

Tommaso Dorigo | 10/01/09 | 00:05 AM
You might see diffraction patterns if you look at a point source of light, like a street light, through that semi-transparent curtain. If the fabric is regular and fine enough it should be visible to the naked eye.

Eirik (not verified) | 10/02/09 | 10:31 AM
dorigo's picture
Hi Eirik,
sure, but there are no street lights outside. I live in downtown Venice!
Cheers,
T.

Tommaso Dorigo | 10/02/09 | 10:33 AM

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