Reluctant golfer that he is, the God of Whizz has finally stumbled across the best use for all those silly little balls – maths. Fractals, in fact.
Rather than serve only to be hooked, sliced, or shanked into the near distance, chased by a volley of insults, hundreds of red and blue golf balls have been put towards a magnificent three-dimensional Sierpinski Triangle (or tetrahedron, in this instance).
A use for golf balls - maths fractal pyramid
To those otherwise unversed in Sierpinski’s Triangle (also known as a ‘gasket’), it’s a beautifully elegant fractal.
See how successively small triangular ’subtractions’ from the main triangle produce a lovely, almost threadlike, fractal pattern. The rules for creating this are simple, and can be repeated ad infinitum.
Sierpinski Triangle (Wikimedia)
(Wikipedia)
You don’t even have to start with a triangle to end up with a triangular-shaped Sierpinski fractal. Try it!
Or, better, try the ‘Chaos Game‘, an exotic-sounding name for something you can play with just pencil, paper, ruler, and die:
(Wikipedia)
[Via Make Blog]