New Video: Twisty Petz as an Application of Theoretical Balloon Twisting (Patreon)

I'm in love with this little children's toy that transforms between an animal and a bracelet. Is it because it embodies concepts of graph theory, or is it because sometimes they are sparkly unicorns? ...Yes.

Twisty Petz are back in style and I found one in a local store, but you can also make them at home using oblong beads and elastic string.

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In 2010 before my videos started going viral online, I frequently gave talks and workshops on using balloon twisting as a way into some mathematical ideas. You can make big fun things with balloons, and the mathematical ideas go from introductory questions about Eulerian paths all the way to the NP-completeness of efficient balloon graph decomposition.

You can find the paper that started it all in the proceedings of the 2008 Canadian Conference for Computational Geometry: https://cccg.ca/proceedings/2008/paper34full.pdf I have nostalgia for this conference because the CCCG is the very first math conference I ever went to in 2001, and I got hooked. I met a community there that I continued to see and find support from at future conferences, including the Demaines who would become my coauthors on this paper 7 years later!

I managed to find the original PDF (attached) for the printed booklet shown in the video, with practical instructions for mathematical balloon twisting, if you want to give that a try too after you're done having fun with Twisty Petz.

Also, hi! Happy July. I've got a special little not-math video coming on the 4th that I hope I will be able to finish in time (a fun one, and not on a topic I think anyone will expect).

🐌,

Vi