Cat-thulhu

Yay!

I have been a diehard Lovecraft fan most of my life! I also love black cats! How can I not love this!

When I truly love a thing, my curiosity goes into hyperdrive. I feel compelled to explore the topic to learn as much about it as I can. This sometimes results in an exponential explosion of questions that will lead toward seemingly disparate ideas. (That is a redundant statement because explosions are exponential by definition, but moving on...) The very first story I read by H.P. Lovecraft was "The Call of Cthulhu". In that story, I encountered a word that had never held my attention for very long before, but that suddenly got stuck in my head like an annoying song: non-Euclidean. I tried to imagine the bizarre, non-Euclidean architecture of R'lyeh and fell short.

So I went to my local library and looked at a bunch of silly math books. I learned about the classical Greek mathematician named Euclid of Alexandria and his inviolate postulates. Some of them were troublesome. I won't trouble you with why, but it is significant to mention that the mathematicians who explored the flaws in Euclid's postulates teetered on the brink of an overwhelming, new awareness of a non-Euclidean reality that terrified them. As a result, many of those mathematicians spent a great deal of energy denying the obvious. They argued that non-Euclidean shapes do not and cannot exist. Those who argued back were considered to be insane. No doubt, that's why Lovecraft used the term non-Euclidean to describe shapes that triggered insanity in those who saw them. Lovecraft alluded to both major areas of non-Euclidean geometry, spherical and hyperbolic. The arguments between scholars who said that Euclid's postulates were bunk and scholars who argued that anyone who denied Euclid's laws were insane lasted for centuries. Well, it turned out that spherical geometry wasn't really so terrifying after all. Mathematicians who dared to challenge Euclid discovered spherical geometry (which studies shapes in spherical space) just under 2,000 years ago. However, hyperbolic geometry continued to puzzle and frighten everyone who peered into the abyss until Daina Taimina decided to take a peek.

It wasn't until I stumbled across a TED Talk presented by science writer Margret Wertheim that I was finally able to picture R'lyeh easily and accurately. She presented a fascinating lecture about hyperbolic geometry, coral reefs, sea slugs, a massive fine art exhibit, and crochet. On the surface, those things have nothing to do with each other, but their connections are quite elegant. According to Wertheim, no one was able to present a mathematically accurate model of hyperbolic geometry until 1997, when mathematician Daina Taimina of Cornell University constructed one using, of all things, yarn and a crochet needle.  Taimina made a non-Euclidean doily that blasted Euclid's "inviolate postulates" to smithereens, and she did not go insane. In fact, according to Taimina's TEDx Talk, the idea came to her in a sudden moment of clarity and her doily saved her students from suffering mental strain. Of course, it turns out that all of those mathematicians who argued that non-Euclidean shapes do not and cannot exist have always been dead wrong. Such shapes are quite natural and have been hiding under the water all along. Sea slugs and coral reefs are non-Euclidean. Who knew?

So, once I learned and understood all of this, I asked the inevitable question. Has anyone used a hyperbolic crochet pattern to make a model of Cthulhu? My search for the answer lead me here. Did you use a hyperbolic crochet pattern?

If the answer is yes, then I have one more question. Would you ever consider crocheting a model of R'lyeh? Surely, someone somewhere must make this happen!

These videos may interest you:

   www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1TBZh… (Daina Taimina on crochet and hyperbolic geometry)

   www.ted.com/talks/margaret_wer… (Margaret Wertheim on crochet, hyperbolic geometry, and coral reefs)