In August, we bring a set of new full-time writers to the blog. Please welcome Juliana Knot (’21), who will be writing for us on the 1st of each month. Juliana graduated from Calvin with a degree in philosophy, mathematics, and German. She covers Southwest Michigan business and agriculture as a reporter for the Herald-Palladium.

During the era of early quarantine, I took up crocheting. The hobby stuck, in large part, because I could do it while watching Netflix.

Early on, the math peeked through the craft. Each row of stitches is in proportion to the one before and after it, and the difference between a hat and a flat circle depends on getting those proportions right. Reading patterns feels like reading code, and when the author miscalculated the stitches needed to get my niece’s pumpkin hat to pucker correctly, it felt like de-bugging code. 

My mom, a former math teacher and professor, talks the same way about quilting. On slow Saturday mornings in Freeman, South Dakota, she would watch as the ladies’ quilting circle measure, ratio, and divide, Euclidean geniuses in their own right.

But crochet and quilting are done first by women and then through math, so we don’t talk much about the latter.

This came to mind when reading about Dr. Daina Taimina, a Cornell mathematics professor who in 1997 created the first effective physical model of hyperbolic plane. Hyperbolic planes are a kind of surface that is constantly curving away from itself as it extends outward into infinity. Coral reefs are naturally occurring models of hyperbolic planes, save for that they extend only finitely.

Prior to Taimina’s work, material models of these surfaces were inexact and made of fragile paper. For some time, mathematicians doubted whether material models could be made. After encountering these models, the Latvian mathematician immediately thought of constructing the surface by crocheting it, rather than using paper. With simple single crochet and slip stitches, she created the first durable, material model of hyperbolic planes.

Taimina’s colleagues were surely brilliant mathematicians, but they were men. More likely than not, they saw crochet as a women’s hobby, rendering the craft invisible to them.

There should be nothing wrong with the description of “women’s hobby;” crochet is in fact a hobby largely done by women. But because women are the ones crocheting, it drips with unseriousness. Who’s doing the activity determines its importance. Women stitch while men solve. 

However, as Taimina showed, there are some solutions that need stitching. If we see women’s activities as trivial, we pass up on them as tools. 

In an op-ed on the importance of textile history, author Virginia Postrel wrote, “The historical achievements and experiences of women and men are like the intertwined warp and weft threads of a woven fabric. Remove either and you have only a bunch of string. Exploring the past experiences of women is valuable not because it weaves a new and separate historical fabric but because it restores strands that have gone missing.”

The ladies’ quilting circle of Freeman, South Dakota, and Dr. Taimina would take this quote one step further: the interests of women, as well as their achievements, are important. Losing that means losing the ability to untangle mathematical bunches of string.

Header image courtesy of EraPhernalia Vintage on Flickr.

Juliana Knot

Juliana Knot graduated from Calvin in 2021 with a degree in philosophy, mathematics, and German. She covers Southwest Michigan business and agriculture as a reporter for the Herald-Palladium.