Project 9: Self Initiated I
(2 Week Project: Initiate a project of whatever interests you... or doesn't)
I set out to change the way that people
perceived tangles. As a person that is obsessed with order and neatness
(especially when it comes to electrical cables, that potentially cause an
unsightly mess) I am constantly irritated by the knotted clump of wire that
emerges from my pocket, as my headphones so frequently get tangled. I posed the question ‘why do things get
tangled?’. I wanted to find a
scientific reason for it, and perhaps try and prevent it from happening.
I soon changed my tone and wanted tangles
to be shown in a more positive light; one that reflects a distinction of
classification through its function rather than the arbitrary perception of an individual. By encompassing knots into the same
bracket as its tangled cousins I tried to shift the balance of tangle being
used as a negative word. There were now two main categories, purpose tangles
and informal tangles. Obviously a
purpose tangle was something that had been knotted consciously and most often
had a function or purpose. The informal tangle however was quite the opposite.
After developing this route for some time,
I felt that it still gave a typical tangle an unfair deal. I started to think
that it was actually the knots themselves where the cause of the frustration
that comes from ‘tangles’. The oxford dictionary describes tangles as “a confused mass of something twisted
together”. Nothing implies
that it involves any knotting, but simple arbitrary twists and loops that
creates only the illusion of a knot. If a tangle can exist independent of
knotting it shouldn’t be to blame when deciphering the annual mess of Christmas
lights or the daily struggle of the headphones.
Running the same idea
of celebrating tangles, it was my goal to change people perceptions of what a
tangle was and see it now as a positive rather than a negative thing. For
example “oh good, my headphones are just tangled! For a second there I thought
they might be knotted…” To do this I researched more into the differences
between the two, in order to discover any key information in that would
contrast each other further. This led me to Jones Polynomial, invented in 1984
by Vaughn Jones, a great mathematician. This polynomial is able to calculate
the exact formula for any given knot. This sounded like a relatively easy task
to do, and I was confident that I could start naming tangles based on their
unique equation. This was until it took an oxford mathematician five hours to
resolve the answer for the simplest possible knot you can make.
This led me to a
conclusion that even the simplest knot was far more complicated than even the
most complex of tangles. No matter the size of the tangle the equation is
always the same and the answer is always 1. For my final piece I still aim to
complete my initial goal of getting people to no longer thing of tangles as a
negative, but I will contrast it with the complexity of a knot. I will
demonstrate that a knot is chaos, ordered and a tangle is ordered chaos,
through my mathematical discoveries. Alongside physical demonstrations of this,
I believe that I will enlighten people to wonders of tangles.
