A bend is a knot securely joining together two lengths of cord (or string or rope), thereby yielding a single longer length. There are many possible different bends, and a natural question that has probably occurred to many is: is there a "best" bend and, if so, what is it?" Most of the well-known bends happen to be symmetric - that is, the two constituent cords within the bend have the same geometric shape and size, as well as an interrelationship. Such "symmetric bends" have great beauty, especially when the two cords bear different colours. Moreover, they have the practical advantage of...

This book is based on the authors' research on rendering images of higher dimensional fractals by a distance estimation technique. It is self-contained, giving a careful treatment of both the known techniques and the authors' new methods. The distance estimation technique was originally applied to Julia sets and the Mandelbrot set in the complex plane. It was justified, through the work of Douady and Hubbard, by deep results in complex analysis. In this book the authors generalise the distance estimation to quatemionic and other higher dimensional fractals, including fractals derived from...

This invaluable book is an introduction to knot and link invariants as generalised amplitudes for a quasi-physical process. The demands of knot theory, coupled with a quantum-statistical framework, create a context that naturally and powerfully includes a extraordinary range of interrelated topics in topology and mathematical physics. The author takes a primarily combinatorial stance toward knot theory and its relations with these subjects. This stance has the advantage of providing direct access to the algebra and to the combinatorial topology, as well as physical ideas.

The book is...

A comprehensive reference in design science, bringing together material from the areas of proportion in architecture and design, tilings and patterns, polyhedra, and symmetry. The book presents both theory and practice and has more than 750 illustrations.

A collection of essays that stand on their own but are also loosely connected. Part I documents how numbers and geometry arise in several cultural contexts and in nature: the ancient musical scale, proportion in architecture, ancient geometry, megalithic stone circles, the hidden pavements of the Laurentian library, the shapes of the Hebrew letters, and the shapes of biological forms. The focus is on how certain numbers, such as the golden and silver means, present themselves within these systems. Part II shows how many of the same numbers and number sequences are related to the modern...

A collection of essays that stand on their own but are also connected. Part I examines how numbers and geometry arise in nature and several cultural contexts. Part II shows how many of the same numbers and number sequences are related to the study of numbers, dynamical systems, chaos and fractals.

Energy of knots is a theory that was introduced to create a "canonical configuration" of a knot -- a beautiful knot which represents its knot type. This book introduces several kinds of energies, and studies the problem of whether or not there is a "canonical configuration" of a knot in each knot type. It also considers this problems in the context of conformal geometry. The energies presented in the book are defined geometrically. They measure the complexity of embeddings and have applications to physical knotting and unknotting through numerical experiments.

We could be on the threshold of a scientific revolution. Quantum mechanics is based on unique, finite and discrete events. General relativity assumes a continuous, curved space-time. Reconciling the two remains the most fundamental unsolved scientific problem left over from the last century. The papers of H. Pierre Noyes collected in this volume reflect one attempt to achieve that unification by replacing the continuum with the bit-string events of computer science. Three principles are used: physics can determine whether two quantities are the same or different; measurement can tell...