Colloquium: “You Have to Grow Wefts to Fold Them”

The Syracuse University Department of Physics is pleased to welcome Dr. Randall Kamien, Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, for his talk titled ‘You Have to Grow Wefts to Fold Them.’

Through a sequence of moves on a one-dimensional strand, knitting creates complex, self-folding, three-dimensional structures. The general geometric motifs that arise are independent of the particular yarns that are used, whether they are elastic, natural, or synthetic. By using the theory of thin shells in the “thick-shell” regime, we are able to capture the folding patterns of a wide variety knitted patterns composed only of the simple stitches, knit and purl. Dr. Kamien will highlight how this is qualitatively different than the behavior of thin shells where the laws of origami and kirigami rule.

Randy was born at a very early age and through the law of entropy has grown to be an old man. In between he studied soft matter at Harvard, The Institute for Advanced Study, and the University of Pennsylvania.