pic: IRI winner's trophy
 

Re: pic: IRI winner's trophy
 

That is by far the best trophy I have ever seen, I think it even beats that other soccer trophy which will not be named...

Re: pic: IRI winner's trophy
 

Great idea for a trophy. Well done, too.

Re: pic: IRI winner's trophy
 

Should the winners be careful of any rubber feet on the bottom?

Very nice!

Re: pic: IRI winner's trophy
 

GoooooaaaaaaaLLLLL!

I can't wait to see it in person.

Re: pic: IRI winner's trophy
 

Mark Koors is amazing.

Re: pic: IRI winner's trophy
 

Ooo. That's pretty, very pretty. Great design, Mark.

I'd be scared of breaking it, though D:

Re: pic: IRI winner's trophy
 

I wouldn't mind seeing a pic of the inside, and what all those screws attach to.

Re: pic: IRI winner's trophy
 

Same. Just using a bit of combinatorial geometry, my guess is that what you'll find is a webbing that is essentially the dual graph¹ of the of soccer ball. Since a soccer ball (or Buckyball mathematically speaking) is a polyhedron of pentagonal and hexagonal faces with vertices of degree 3, the resulting dual will be a polyhedron with only triangular faces, with vertices of degree 5 and 6. These vertices look to be the insertion points of the screws.

All that being said, the webbing might be constructed differently than the perfect dual graph to allow for easier assembly and construction. Alas, what is perfect and elegant in the mathematical world, rarely works in the real world.

1. In graph theory, a dual graph of a given graph G is a graph which has a vertex for each plane region of G, and an edge for each edge in G joining two neighboring regions. This theory can be extending into 3D polyhedra geometry.

Re: pic: IRI winner's trophy
 

Karthik, please sit with me at IRI and explain what all of this means. I assume it is Canadian for "soccer ball"?

:)

Re: pic: IRI winner's trophy
 

Actually, I had one of my roommates translate it.



(Actually, I am wishing that the prof who was most familiar with graph theory wasn't off campus at the moment, I'm very curious too)

Re: pic: IRI winner's trophy
 

In layman's terms: Pretend the bolt heads are dots. Connect the dots. Some dots have 5 connections, some have 6. It makes a pretty cool shape made of triangles.

Re: pic: IRI winner's trophy
 

After ignoring much of the silliness of what was posted above, we just took a picture of the ball without the blue glass pieces.

The inside structure is made from 2 polycarbonate hemispheres, each 1/16" thick.

Andy B.

(edit... on second thought, I could post something similar to Karthik's convoluted solution and said that we used some 7-axis CNC welding process to do this. But, I didn't. :) )

Re: pic: IRI winner's trophy
 

Sorry for injecting some interesting math (well, at least interesting to me) in to the discussion. In the future I'll restrict my posts to drivel like "OMG. That's sooooo cool!" :P

Anyways, here's a picture I found on the web that illustrates what I was talking about with the dual. (Found on a combinatorial geometry course website at Merrimack College)



Clearly too complicated to fabricate, but still pretty cool. (Or just general ignorable silliness. :) )

Re: pic: IRI winner's trophy
 

I thought it was great, Karthik. It's about time some of our younger members and some of our newer mentors had this opportunity to read some of your thoughts/thinking/posts.

And... I followed some of it so I know that people who understand/grasp math concepts much better than I do would appreciate it with a greater and deeper understanding.


Jane