Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

Recently the videos that Paul and I made about the Yoshimoto Cube got shared around a bit on the web. That got me to thinking again about splitting cubes apart, because the Yoshimoto Cube is made up of two pieces that are each half of a cube.

A friend of mine once shared with me some drawings of cubes by the artist Sol LeWitt. The cubes were drawn as solid objects, but parts of them were cut away and removed. It was fun trying to figure out what fraction of a cube remained.

On the web, I found a beautiful image that Sol made called Wall Drawing #601. In the clipping of it to the left, I see 7/8 of a cube and 3/4 of a cube. Do you? You can view the whole of this piece by Sol on the website of the Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation.

There are other kinds of objects that break a cube into pieces in this way, like this tricky puzzle by Vaclav Obsivac and this “shaved” Rubik’s cube modification. Maybe you’ll design a cube dissection of your own!

As I further researched Sol LeWitt’s art, I found that he had investigated partial cubes in other ways, too. My favorite of Sol’s tinkerings is the sculpture installation called “Variations of Incomplete Cubes“. You can check out this piece of artwork on the SFMOMA site, as well as in the video below.

In the video, a diagram appears that Sol made of all of the incomplete open cubes. He carefully listed out and arranged these pictures to make sure that he had found them all—a very mathematical task. It reminds me of the list of rectangle subdivisions I wrote about in this post.

Sol’s diagram got me to thinking and making: what other shapes might have interesting “incomplete open” variations? I started working on tetrahedra. I think I might try to find and make them all. How about you?

Finally, as I browsed Google Images for “half cube”, one image in particular jumped out at me.

What are those?!?!

These lovely rose-shaped objects are called spidrons—or more precisely, they appear to be half-cubes built out of fold-up spidrons. What are spidrons? I had never heard of them, but there’s one pictured to the right and they have their own Wikipedia article.

The first person who modeled a spidron was Dániel Erdély, a Hungarian designer and artist. Dániel started to work with spidrons as a part of a homework assignment from Ernő Rubik—that’s right, the man who invented the Rubik’s cube.

Here are two how-to videos that can help you to make a 3D spidron—the first step to making lovely shapes like those pictured above. The first video shows how to get set up with a template, and the second is brought to you by Dániel himself! Watching these folded spidrons spiral and spring is amazing. There’s more to see and read about spidrons in this Science News article and on Dániel’s website.

And how about a sphidron? Or a hornflake—perhaps a cousin to the flowsnake? So many cool shapes!

To my delight, I found that Dániel has created a video called Yoshimoto Spidronised—bringing my cube splitting adventure back around full circle. You’ll find it below. Bon appetit!

Reflection Sheet – Partial Cubes, Open Cubes, and Spidrons