Daina Taimina

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Daina Taimina with husband David Henderson and crocheted hyperbolic plane (in foreground)

Daina Taimina is a Latvian mathematician at Cornell University who crochets objects to illustrate hyperbolic space.

She came up with the idea in an idle moment during a camping trip in 1997, based on paper models designed by geometer William Thurston. Colleagues were intrigued that her creations embodied concepts they had been teaching for years but never actually seen. She was invited, together with her husband David Henderson, a math professor also at Cornell, to give a presentation at a Cornell workshop.

An article about her in New Scientist was spotted by an official of the Institute For Figuring, an educational organisation based in Los Angeles and she was invited to speak about her creations there to an audience which included artists and movie producers. In 2005 the Institute For Figuring curated an exhibition of her work at Machine Project gallery, which was the subject of a piece in the Los Angeles Times.

Her work has also been published in several other periodicals, such as 'Knit Theory' in Discover magazine.

Now her work makes up part of an exhibition entitled "Not The Knitting You Know" at Eleven Eleven Sculpture Space, an art gallery in Washington, D.C.