Build the curving lattices behind Bathsheba Grossman's sculptures, trim one to a shape, check it will print, and download an STL file to print it yourself.
For years, the winners of Al Zimmermann's Programming Contests could choose their prize from the work of the sculptor Bathsheba Grossman: small pieces of metal and glass built from pure mathematics. Al's gallery has winners holding them: Walter Trump with Ora, the Retaining Water prize; Tom Rokicki with his Borromean rings; Jarek Wroblewski with two pieces he calls his "720-cell". The Lattice Foundry is our nod to those prizes. Anyone can now design one, and with a 3D printer, hold it.
These are triply periodic minimal surfaces: a single surface that repeats forever in all three directions, splitting space into two tangled halves, and curving so that it has the least area it can. Hermann Schwarz found the first ones in the 1860s and 1880s (the "P" and "D" surfaces). Edvard Neovius added another in 1883. In 1970 Alan Schoen, working for NASA, found the gyroid, the twisty one that has no straight lines on it at all. It turns out nature found it first: butterfly wings and some polymers grow in gyroid shapes.
The page draws each surface from a short formula, gives it a wall, cuts it to the outer shape you pick, and builds the triangle mesh in your browser. Export STL saves a ready-to-print file (in millimetres, sitting flat on the bed) with a note of your settings.
