Bobbin lace, a 500-year-old art form, features delicate patterns formed by alternating braids.



Veronika is a computer scientist and a lacemaker. She has developed a mathematical model to describe bobbin lace tessellations as a drawing of a 2-regular directed graph on a torus and a mapping from the vertices of the graph to braid words. Based on this model, she has used a combinatorial search to look for new patterns for this fiber art form. Having found millions of matches, she has refined the algorithmic search to look for patterns with specific types of symmetry. In particular, she has sought out symmetries that are relatively rare or unknown in traditional practice such as six and three fold mirrors and rotations.



