Little Coloured Bricks

Photo Via AndrewLipson.com

According to many people, Lego is the best thing that ever came from Denmark except of course Danish cookies and the Danish themselves. Since the making of Lego, many Lego artists realized their dream of building something that are now ogled at with awe and admiration.

Andrew Lipson who considers himself a professional nerd is a Lego builder and one of the most awe-inspiring works he has done are the mathematical Lego sculptures that according to the nerd er artist was done with the help of a computer. He had to calculate which brick should go on top of the other so to speak.

Andrew Lipson may have built objects some may consider weird but for those who are into mathematical stuff the first picture you can see here is true-blue nerdy art. Now kids shouldn’t be bullying nerds because it’s the nerds who make great Lego art and in most cases, make more money when they grow up. Hurray to that!

Andrew Lipson’s Bour’s surface is a complicated mathematical structure. However complicated, the sculpture looks extremely cool and rather complicated to make so kudos to Lipson for showing us how it’s done.

Photo Courtesy of AndrewLipson.com

Lipson said “Bour’s surface can be parametrised as

x = r cos(t) - r² cos(2t) / 2

y = -r sin(t) - r² sin(2t) / 2

z = (4/3) r^1/2 cos(3t/2)

and the model shows this parametrisation for 0 < t < 4p, 1 < r < 4. There’s no particular mathematical reason for taking the image of an annulus like this rather than a disk, but the hole left in the center lets you see the structure better. And anyway, it makes building it more of a challenge and looks cool…” If you understood what that meant, kudos to you too! Thanks to Lipson, for his marvelous work.