Synthesis Studios

I’ll bet most people do not consider knitting and crocheting to be nerdy hobbies. Given that their main proponents tend to be grandmothers and trendy celebrities, I can see why that would be. However, these arts and crafts projects can have enough math and problem solving to make them into full blown engineering endeavors.

First, there’s the calibration. If you want your clothing to fit as promised, you’ll need to knit a gauge square to proportionally compare it to the dimensions in the pattern. If they differ, you will need to change your materials to get your work to the appropriate scale. Then, you’ll face something like this:

Row 1 [RS]: K2tog, yo, [ssk, k2, yo] to last st, k1.
Row 2 [WS]: P1, [yo, p2, PSP] to last 2 sts, yo, p2tog.
Rows 3-4: Work as for Rows 1-2.

his example only gets you a few millimeters of a knitted object - such patterns can go on for pages. If you thought Ikea furniture directions were difficult, deciphering such a cryptic arrangement of text (often with accompanying charts) can make you long for that Allen wrench. And, that doesn’t even touch on the problem solving skills needed to debug errors! Knitting patterns are enough of a puzzle to solve that the kids over at the MIT Mystery Hunt this year had a puzzle that required you to knit (or simulate knitting) the answer.

It’s no wonder that a healthy contingent of scientists and engineers are drawn to the craft — often taking their subject matter deep into the depths of their respective fields. From DNA to one-sided surfaces, from D&D dice to Space Invaders socks – people have found a multitude of ways to immortalize their nerdiest interests in yarn.

I want to play! For my first foray into such geeky knitting projects, I decided to crochet a Sierpinski Carpet blanket. The self-repeating squares of the fractal seemed to lend itself to being well to being assembled from a collection of granny squares.

Here’s what it looks like in my head:

Here’s what it looks like in reality (so far):

If I ever finish, perhaps I could convince eight other people to make the appropriate blankets to combine to be the next level of complexity. And, then…