Outreach

I have always been interested both in strengthening the communication between different mathematical disciplines, as well as communicating the joys of mathematics to a non-mathematical audience. During my masters’ I was involved in a project which aimed to communicate the basic concepts of polytopes to a general audience. The main project was to develop the online platform Polytopia.

Polytopia

A math communication and citizen art project.

Polytopia is a math communication project that makes polytopes accessible to a general audience. This project is associated to the Collaborative Research Center Discretization in Geometry and Dynamics and was lead by Anna Maria Hartkopf.

On the website one can adopt a 3-dimensional polytope, give it a name and customize it by coloring its faces. It is accompanied by a crafting sheet and files for 3D-printing, with which it can be brought to life in the real world. Using a VR viewer such as a Google Cardboard, all polytopes can be investigated on the website in virtual reality¹. To explore the world of polyhedra even further, there is teaching material for middle and high school classes, as well as a mini-game, in which one can find Hamiltonian cycles on the 1-skeleton of the polytopes.

I was mainly involved in the implementation of the ThreeJS-viewer that is used to display the polytopes can be found in this repository. It also contains the implementation of the VR viewer and the mini-game for finding Hamiltonian cycles.