Inspired by mathematical theorems or open problems...

September 8, 2015 6:40 AM

Conveyer Belt Font. More mathematical and puzzle fonts/typefaces you can play with in your browser. Read about them in the article Fun with Fonts: Algorithmic Typography. [PDF]
posted by Wolfdog (6 comments total)

I think my favorite is the glass cane font. Some of the others, the connection between the letters and the font letters is significantly more tenuous. I didn't read the paper, though, to verify that all the canes are distinguishable from their displayed vertical cross-section.
posted by leahwrenn at 7:03 AM on September 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think the one that raises my curiosity the most to explore more is the Origami Maze font.
posted by Wolfdog at 7:13 AM on September 8, 2015

Boy does my eye want to draw lines through points rather than wrap belts around them.
posted by benito.strauss at 9:41 AM on September 8, 2015

Oh man, the glass cane one is almost perfectly invertible. It turns a collection of N points into a graph of N sine waves. If we think in polar coordinates, the amplitudes of the waves are the radius of the original point, and the starting point along the waves (phase) give us the theta of the original point -- though it's more like the absolute value of the sine of the theta, so it's a four-to-one mapping.
posted by benito.strauss at 9:51 AM on September 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

benito.strauss: I wonder if you could recover the original letter by taking the Radon transform of the glass-cane figure.
posted by pmdboi at 9:59 AM on September 8, 2015

I don't know how you distinguish between the four different angles that all give the same |sin θ|. I'd really like to see the font-form for lower-case 'b' and 'd' -- I have a feeling that letters that are reflections of each other give awfully similar glass canes. Maybe if you were supplied exact details of the transform, like is the top or the bottom of the glass cane the initial state, and whether they were twisted CW or CCW.
posted by benito.strauss at 10:53 AM on September 8, 2015