3D Printing Papers and Projects (Prof. Edward Aboufadel)

Papers and Projects

"3D Printing Projects for Math Majors" -- recorded talk by E. Aboufadel at the 2016 SIAM Conference on Applied Mathematics Education

E. Aboufadel's Thingiverse page

(by Reuben Wattenhofer, 2018)

Folding Nets to Create Polyhedral Solids: The purpose of this project was to create an algorithm that automatically folds nets into polyhedra, generalizing the Cheng Associahedron project. Supporting files: Mathematica.

Open image in new tab to restart animation: Triangular cupola and Truncated icosohedron.

(by Samantha Law and E. Aboufadel, 2015-18)

3D Printing of Eugenia Cheng's "Associahedron" -- appeared in 2018 in the Pi Mu Epsilon Journal.

(by E. Aboufadel, 2014-16)

Creating a 3D print from a portrait

JDRF 3D-Printed Logo

(by E. Aboufadel, Winter 2014)

3D Printing the MAA Logo's Icosohedron

Supporting File: Large icosohedron file

(by Melissa Sherman-Bennett, Sylvanna Krawczyk, and E. Aboufadel, Summer 2013)

During the summer of 2013, Melissa Sherman-Bennett, Sylvanna Krawczyk, and Prof. Edward Aboufadel investigated how to use a 3D printer, applying mathematical ideas to data sets to print a variety of objects. They wrote a primer on 3D printing for mathematics professors and their students (link available below). In the primer is the description of a number of projects that can be completed with a 3D printer. For many of the projects, Mathematica is used to design objects that mathematicians may be interested in printing. Included in the projects that are described is a method to acquire data from an XBox Kinect.

A Brief Selection of Interesting Mathematically-Connected 3D Printing Links

3D Printing Dictionary, from ZMorph3D

3D printed houses in Mexico

My Mini Factory's 3D Filter editors

Dilanka Wettewa's Ultimate 3D-Printing Cheat Sheet

August 2015: What Can A Mathematician Do With A 3D Printer? -- Contributed Paper Session at MathFest, Washington, DC (TCPS #9)

September 2016: Enhancing Mathematical Learning Experiences with 3D Printing -- Session at the 2016 SIAM Conference on Applied Mathematics Education: Part I, Part II.

2015 TED Talk -- Making 3D Printing 100x Faster and Science article (by Joseph DeSimone)

Laura Taalman's MakerHome blog -- A mathematics professor created a 3D print every day for a year.

Elizabeth Denne's Mathematical Visualization page

3D Printed Models for Multivariable Calculus (by John Zweck)

OPENSCAD home page (free 3D editor)

Using "2.5D pyramids" (by Richard Zhang)

A trefoil knot and its fibrations (by Fred Hohman)

David Austin's Feature Column on the construction of the extruder path from the STL file.

Francesco de Comité's homepage (using several programming languages (Java+ImageJ), or software tools with programming facilities (Povray, Blender))

Henry Segerman's paper on 3D printing for mathematics visualization & Segerman's web page on 3D printing

Oliver Knill (of Harvard U.)'s pages on 3D printing (includes the Archmides proof)

Daniel Walsh's Geometric Curiosities

George Hart's 3D Fractals, etc.

3-D Printed "Shoes" Generated Using Conway's Game of Life

Bathsheba Grossman (inspired by math)

David Bachman's 3D printing pages

Gregor Luetolf's "Gem Komplett" (a single object which contains all the Archimedean and Catalan solids). More here.

3D-printed parabola manipulative (by Matthew Peterson)

3D Printing & Big Data

Back to Prof. Aboufadel's applied mathematics page.