Lego Scherk Surface

Yet another minimal surface - this one was pretty easy, but it's a nice example of a saddle point built from Lego. Only standard (1xn and 2xn) bricks were used.

 

 

 As with most of my mathematical surfaces, I made use of some computer assistance. Just in case anyone's interested, here's the raw LDRAW .DAT file generated by my program for this sculpture. Beware - the .DAT file builds it out of 1x1 bricks. Actually constructing this out of larger bricks so that it holds together is a (non-trivial) exercise for the reader!

This model shows (most of) one cell of a doubly-periodic Scherk surface. Actually Scherk discovered more than one minimal surface in 1835, but this one has the particularly simple parametrisation given by  exp(z) = cos(x)/cos(y). This model shows the surface in the region |x|, |y| < p/2 - 0.01.

Here are some links to pages related to the Scherk surface:

The contents of this page are Copyright © A. Lipson 2002

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