Most topologists – mathematicians who study imaginary multidimensional shapes – think of their constructs as made of a sort of infinitely stretchy rubber. But Andrew Lipson is a very special kind of topologist: In his world, everything is made of little plastic bricks.
Lipson, 42, studied at Cambridge, where he received an undergrad degree in math and a PhD in knot theory (yes, they give out doctorates for that). These days he's a programmer at an investment bank in the UK, but in his spare time he builds improbable objects out of Legos. He has pieced together Möbius strips of various sizes, trefoil and figure-eight knots, a punctured torus, and several so-called minimal surfaces.
To design an embedded Klein bottle – a vessel that's made of two Möbius strips and has no inside or outside – Lipson used the high-powered software Mathematica. "It's kind of a sledgehammer to crack a nut," he admits. But for most of his creations, Lipson relies on his skills with the programming languages C and C++ to translate the forms into schematics that can be used for Lego constructions. Still, the design is the easy part. "Building it out of real bricks so that it holds together can be surprisingly hard," Lipson says. "But that's where the fun is." His most difficult shape to date? The Boy's Surface, a "nonorientable two-dimensional manifold," which took approximately 4,000 blue Legos. "I very nearly ran out of blue," he says. "I was reduced to my last half-dozen two-by-four bricks." Now if only Lego would sell its one-by-three bricks in bulk, Lipson would be the happiest topologist ever.
– Greta Lorge
Andrew Lipson
credit Gemma Booth
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