Adapting and printing 3-dimensional mathematical objects

In Easter term we ran a mini workshop on 3D printing with about 15 students. They came up with a couple of nice models using OpenSCAD, MeshLab, Blender or Mathematica as well as importing objects from Thingiverse. The .stl files that they produced then were passed on to the ZPrinter 650 in the Archaeology department, adapted in size and modelled with (random) colours. Finally they were then excavated and cleaned by Beth Upex as well as glued by Richard Allen there.

Here are pictures of a couple of results:

  • Collection
  • Collection (from a different angle)

    Individual pictures (taken by Yingxue Shang) and quick descriptions:

  • 2-3 torus link (Josh Yaxley)
  • Voronoi lattice of a Seifert surface of the Borromean rings (Lucia Gray-Lucero) (different angle)
  • Klein Bottle in Voronoi shape (Katherine Noble)
  • Menger Cube (Esther Goldberg)
  • Dodecahedron with five inscribed cubes (Andrej Moisejevs)
  • 3D-Mandelbrot set (Josh Males)
  • Double Helix (Josh Yaxley)
  • Tesseract (Andrej Moisejevs)
  • Tetrix (3D version of Sierpinski triangle) (Josh Inoue)

    Other models include a trefoil knot that looks like a figure 8 knot (pink, Dillon Reihill), Borromean rings (blue, Aaron Poole), a slice of a Menger cube (orange, Lu Liu (?)), a tetrahedral frame with encaged balls (yellow, ?) and a ball inside a larger ball with geometrically shaped holes (light green, Yingxue Shang).