Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Trillium Bouquet

Impatient Trillium Bouquet, by Meenakshi Mukerji.  Textbook for scale.

Today I have a simple model, from Meenakshi Mukerji's "Blintz Base Bouquet" series.  They're all based on the blintz fold, which is simply folding all four corners of a square to the center.

There's one interesting about this model, math-wise.

Each unit consists of two colors.  The major color (blue, light blue, green, or purple) makes the structure of the unit.  The minor color (red, pink, or light pink) is simply inserted for color's sake.  There are twelve units total, making up the twelve edges of an octahedron.

What's interesting is that both the major and minor colors constitute "proper symmetric" colorings of the octahedron edges.  But they are distinct colorings, because there are four major colors, and three minor colors.  Furthermore, the twelve units have all twelve possible combinations of major and minor colors.  Isn't that elegant?

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