(Video) The beautiful math of coral (and crochet)

I thought I'd share this video I came across while browsing TED talks. Margaret Wertheim creates entire lifelike replicas of coral reefs by crochet.

There's a lot of very good info contained in the vid but I'll leave that for the discussion

 

It's incredible, isn't it?

The astounding point for me is that, for centuries we have had these great minds saying "you can't do that, you can't do that" regarding hyperbolic lines when we've got roughly 72% of our entire planet living in an environment that allows such a thing to exist.

"Well, I can't say there have been many mathematicians looking at sea slugs"

 

"How exactly does a posi-trac rear end in a Plymouth work."
"Nobody knows!"
"Joe dirts dad"