Daina Taimiņa

Biography

In the summer of 1997 Daina Taimiņa sat by a swimming pool on a farm in Pennsylvania and crocheted. What she was making was a set of models of the hyperbolic plane for a geometry course at Cornell University that autumn.

The idea had come a few months earlier.

She was born on 19 August 1954 in Riga. All of her formal education took place there: in 1977 she graduated with distinction from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the Latvian State University. Her dissertation in theoretical computer science, on the behaviour of automata and Turing machines on infinite words, written under Rūsiņš Mārtiņš Freivalds, could not be defended in Latvia at the time, so the defence took place in Minsk: at the Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences of Belarus she received the degree of Candidate of Sciences in 1990. After Latvia regained its independence, in 1992, she defended her doctoral dissertation at the University of Latvia. She taught there for about twenty years and also worked at the Institute for Teacher Training in Riga. In 1992–1996 she was a scientific editor at the publishing houses Zvaigzne and Mācību grāmata; by one account her Riga period ended there, by another she went on teaching at the University of Latvia for longer. She had already brought out a book on the history of mathematics in 1990, and earlier, in 1981, a work on the mathematics of antiquity was published in Riga.

She came to Cornell University at the end of 1996, first as an associate professor and later teaching mathematics there as a professor. A few months later, in 1997, at a workshop for university geometry teachers, David Henderson showed a paper model of the hyperbolic plane, made of thin circular strips taped together, designed by William Thurston. The paper was fragile. That same night Taimiņa began working out a crochet pattern: if you picture the hyperbolic plane as exponential growth, it is enough to add stitches at a regular rate, say one extra stitch for every five in the previous row. The rows grow longer, the fabric will not lie flat and folds itself into ruffles, and those folds are the curvature.

Her students, by their own account, valued being able to explore hyperbolic geometry with their hands. It was exactly what Taimiņa herself had missed when she first learned the subject. With Henderson she ran workshops for geometry teachers, and the crocheted models went into the textbooks they wrote together; the best known, “Experiencing Geometry: Euclidean and Non-Euclidean with History” (2005, third edition), appeared in a fourth edition in 2020 as an open-access book.

A piece about her discovery in New Scientist caught the eye of the Institute For Figuring, a small non-profit organisation in Los Angeles, and Taimiņa was invited to speak to a general audience that included artists and film producers. Models conceived as purely mathematical soon came to be seen as handcraft art. In June 2005 they were first shown as art, in the exhibition “Not The Knitting You Know” at Eleven Eleven Sculpture Space, a gallery in Washington. Shows followed in the United States, the United Kingdom, Latvia, Italy, Belgium, Ireland and Germany. Her works are in private collections, in colleges and universities, in the American Mathematical Model Collection of the Smithsonian, at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and at the Institut Henri Poincaré. The Institute For Figuring published a brochure, “A Field Guide to Hyperbolic Space”, and Margaret Wertheim, a co-founder of the institute, used Taimiņa’s approach in the Crochet Coral Reef project. Taimiņa herself is one of the 24 mathematicians and artists of the Mathemalchemy team.

Her book “Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes” (AK Peters, 2009) won the 2009 Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year, and in 2012, at the other end of the scale, the Euler Book Prize of the Mathematical Association of America. In the foreword Thurston called the models “deceptively interesting”. To my mind, that comment gets closest to the point: here crochet is not a decoration added to mathematics but a way of understanding it.