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This is happening in New York this month at NYU and at the World  
Financial Center.

http://www.theiff.org/reef/index.html

Thanks to Rebecca Reitz, the Hall of Science's Science Librarian for  
this lead.

Eric Siegel


Want to Save a Coral Reef? Bring Along Your Crochet Hook
By PATRICIA COHEN

The exotically shaped creatures that began to sprout silently all  
over the cozy lecture hall were soon spilling onto empty chairs and  
into women’s laps and shopping bags. When fully grown, these  
curiously animate forms will find a home as part of a mammoth version  
of the Great Barrier Reef. But at the moment they were emerging at a  
remarkable pace from the rapidly flicking crochet hooks wielded by  
members of the audience.

This environmental version of the AIDS quilt is meant to draw  
attention to how rising temperatures and pollution are destroying the  
reef, the world’s largest natural wonder, said Margaret Wertheim, an  
organizer of the project, who was in Manhattan last weekend to  
lecture, offer crocheting workshops and gather recruits. The reef is  
scheduled to arrive in New York City next month.

As she explained to the 40 people, nearly all women, who had gathered  
at New York University on Saturday, “This has grown from something  
that was a little object on our coffee table” to an exhibition that,  
so far, spreads over 3,000 square feet. And that was before the  
addition of that day’s catch.

Ms. Wertheim, a science writer, and her twin sister, Christine, who  
teaches at the California Institute for the Arts, came up with the  
idea of creating a woolly homage to the reef about two and a half  
years ago. The Wertheims, 49, grew up in Queensland in Australia,  
where the approximately 135,000-square-mile reef — and the billions  
of tiny organisms that it comprises — is located. But the Hyperbolic  
Crochet Coral Reef (more on that in a moment), is much more than a  
warning about global warming. It marks the intersection of the  
Wertheims’ various passions: science, mathematics, art, feminism,  
handicrafts and social activism.

For that reason the project has attracted a wide range of  
participants, including the Harlem Knitting Circle (which arrived  
with 10 members), a student from a Westchester high school’s  
environmental science club who had never crocheted before, a  
geoscientist and a former mathematics teacher and sheep farmer in  
Australia who creates algorithms to calculate the length of yarn  
she’ll need before spinning and dying the wool from her own sheep. In  
Chicago, where the exhibition appeared a few months ago, about 100  
women contributed to the reef.

News of the project has been all over the online knitting and crochet  
world, which is how Njoya Angrum, the founder of the Harlem Knitting  
Circle, and Barbara H. Van Elsen of the New York City Crochet Guild  
discovered it.

“It pushes the boundaries of crochet, using different materials,”  
said Ms. Van Elsen, who wore to the gathering a bright orange yellow  
and green necklace that she had crocheted. “Exploring texture and  
color, it frees you up.”

It’s also “the greatest way to get people really aware of what’s  
going on in the world,” she added.

For Ms. Wertheim, a lithe woman with a no-nonsense attitude and  
closely cropped black and gray hair, the project embodies the “beauty  
and creativity that comes out of scientific thinking,” what she  
refers to as “conceptual enchantment.” As it turns out, the  
gorgeously crenellated, warped and undulating corals, anemones,  
kelps, sponges, nudibranchs, flatworms and slugs that live in the  
reef have what are known as hyperbolic geometric structures: shapes  
that mathematicians, until recently, thought did not exist outside of  
the human imagination.

“For God’s sake, please give it up,” Wolfgang Bolyai told his son,  
Jonas, a 19th century mathematician who was working on this sort of  
non-Euclidean geometry. “Fear it no less than the sensual passion,  
because it too may take up all your time and deprive you of your  
health, peace of mind and happiness in life.”

Actually these hyperbolic forms can be glimpsed all around, in the  
ruffled edges of kale leaves, the ruching that “Project Runway”  
designers favor, rippling ballerina tutus and drugstore scrunchies  
that girls use to gather a ponytail.

Yet mathematicians hadn’t focused attention in their direction. It  
wasn’t until 1997 that Daina Taimina, a mathematics researcher at  
Cornell who had learned to crochet as a child in Latvia, realized  
that by continually adding stitches in a precise repeating pattern  
she could create three-dimensional models of hyperbolic geometry.

For the first time mathematicians could, as Ms. Wertheim said, “hold  
the theorems in their hands.”

The Wertheims read about Ms. Taimina’s work a few years ago and  
invited her and her husband, also a mathematician, to speak at their  
Institute for Figuring, a nonprofit educational organization that  
they founded and run from a Los Angeles post office box. From these  
oddly frilled forms the Wertheims got the idea for the Hyperbolic  
Crochet Coral Reef. The Institute for the Humanities at New York  
University is co-sponsoring the exhibit, which will appear in the  
university’s Broadway Windows at East 10th Street and at the World  
Financial Center April 5 through May 18.

In the university’s auditorium Ms. Wertheim opened a large bag and  
began throwing out long snaking tubes, tightly scrunched blooms, fat  
textured spirals, and hairy coiled cactuses created out of yarn,  
thread, plastic bags, ties, can flip tops, videotape, ribbon, tinsel  
and more in a riotous splash of reds, blues, pinks, oranges, greens,  
tans, purples and yellows.

Later the group members traipsed upstairs to a large jewelry studio  
where they settled at one of six thick wooden worktables and began  
crocheting. The woven organisms developed so quickly it seemed as  
though time-lapse photography was at work.

“I was curious at first about how to do the forms, but then I was  
more intrigued by the message,” said Tina Bliss, a graphic designer  
who lives on Staten Island. Now, with two knitting groups, she has  
become “an evangelist” and wants “to bring a coral reef back to  
Staten Island.”

Mr. Wertheim emphasizes that the art and the science — the  
“conceptual enchantment” — are open to everyone. Aniqua Wilkerson, a  
member of the Harlem Knitting Circle, explained she first learned to  
knit seven years ago from books and through trial and error. She had  
tried to crochet hats, but they kept buckling. “That was a mistake,”  
she said as she finished up a tightly woven urchin in lime green,  
melon and turquoise. “I realized it was from increasing the stitches  
too much.” Which is precisely the method used to create hyperbolic  
forms.

“Wow,” Ms. Wilkerson said, “I’d been doing that all along.”

Eric Siegel
esiegel at nyscience dot org




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