Quilters are the best at graph theory

June 3, 2021 11:11 AM

Mackenzie Leake's CS doctoral dissertation is an algorithm for constructing patterns for paper pieced quilts. Here's the paper she'll present at SIGGRAPH 2021 (worth a look at the pdf - the graphs are so interesting!).
posted by bluefly (8 comments total)

This is so neat! I didn't quite follow til I watched the youtube video, but how neat.
posted by dpx.mfx at 12:26 PM on June 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

This is amazing! My MIL does a lot of paper piecing, and I knew just from seeing her work that it was highly complicated. But I didn’t realize that there were non-piecable designs that she had to rule out in the process. This really helps me appreciate the mathematical side of the work. (Definitely watch the video, btw!)
posted by voltairemodern at 1:20 PM on June 3, 2021

As someone who's dabbled in this, I don't know nearly enough about quilting (much less math and algorithms) to fully understand this, but I'm having an "OOH THIS IS COOL" response, so, uh?

Thank you for posting this, bluefly!
posted by Lexica at 1:22 PM on June 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

MeFi's Own™ Matt Zucker just finished a rather lovely Penrose tiling quilt.
posted by scruss at 3:11 PM on June 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

I think it speaks to different learning styles that I found it easier to understand the pdf text of the paper rather than the video ;). I'm glad they included both!
posted by bluefly at 3:50 PM on June 3, 2021

This is truly wonderful!

Also, in case anyone else with a smattering of graph theory was wondering, the "dual hypergraph" of a quilting design that they mention is an analogy/extension of (planar) dual graphs and not related to the dual of some other hypergraph that they define. I was confused for a little while before I realized why they were calling it that because I think the latter usage is much more common in hypergraph contexts.
posted by mhum at 4:20 PM on June 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

This is definitely my jam. Quilting, and graphs. I’m now facing a bit of an urge to find quilt patterns dual to the hypergraphs I’ve been hanging out with recently. Thanks!
posted by nat at 11:08 PM on June 3, 2021

I don't know graph theory but I appreciate quilts. This is cool! thanks for posting!
posted by dismas at 7:05 AM on June 4, 2021