Hello!

-
From a very young age, I have had a fascination with math. It was the one subject that I was always eager to learn more about and enjoyed studying. However, my interest in math does not necessarily mean that I was always good at it. Throughout elementary school, I had years where I struggled to pass math and I had a rough start in my honors math classes in high school. It wasn't until my second semester of my sophomore year of high school that I was able to finally realize that I needed to not only know what to do to solve a problem, but I also had to understand why I was doing the steps that I was doing. After this realization, I was able to thrive in math. Math isn't simply memorization. Math is its own world. By the time I graduated high school, I knew that I wanted to pursue a career that allowed me to further explore the world of mathematics. Thus, I decided that I wanted to become a high school math teacher so that I can obtain a deeper understanding of math as well as help students realize that math has a fundamental role in our lives and it is not as dull as it seems.

I applied for the NSF-EXPLORE Summer Research program because I am hoping to enrich my understanding of math along with enhancing my critical thinking skills by learning how to do research. In addition, I saw this as an opportunity to grow not only academically but also on a personal level as I hope to be challenged. Therefore, this summer, I will be using my knowledge in calculus that I obtained in my first two years of college and I will explore minimal surfaces and soap bubbles while using 3D printing.

Back in Calculus III, I built my nameplate in Tinkercad.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Exhibition of Minimal Surfaces

-
Image
In my previous blog post, I provided a brief history and explanation of the math of minimal surfaces. Now, in this post, I will give a plethora of examples of minimal surfaces as well as illustrate the relationship between minimal surfaces and soap films and demonstrate applications to 3D printing. Some of the examples will include images from Maple where I plotted the surface and colored it by its mean curvature, while other examples were taken from online because the minimal surfaces were too difficult to plot. Overall, this post is meant to be a visual presentation of minimal surfaces. The first nontrivial minimal surface was discovered by Leonhard Euler in 1744, which is now known as the catenoid (Dillen & Verstraelen, 2000, p.207) . The catenoid on the right is colored by its mean curvature. It is a single color because the mean curvature is zero at every point. In order to plot the catenoid in Maple, I used the uv -parameterization that  Weisstein provided on Wolf...
Read more

Printing a Gorgeous Goblet with the Help of Maple

-
Image
Part 1: Generating the 3D Model in Maple Along with using Tinkercad to create stunning egg lamps, I used Maple, a powerful math software, to design a unique 3D goblet. Unlike Tinkercad, Maple does not have built in shapes that one can modify to obtain their desired object. Rather, Maple allows me to graph functions so that I can see the 2D version of the goblet before I revolve the functions about the z-axis in order to generate the 3D model. Thus, using Maple was more challenging than building objects in Tinkercad, but Maple has an abundance of commands that enables one to generate a 3D model of a complex object. The goal of this goblet project was to not only successfully design and 3D print the goblet, but to also learn how to use the various Maple commands and to calculate the volume of the goblet using calculus methods. Before opening Maple, I had to ponder about the shape of the goblet as I wanted the stem to consist of several different functions, ellipses, or circles so tha...
Read more

Thinking, Creating, and Printing Using Tinkercad

-
Image
My first task this summer was to create useful objects using Tinkercad. It sounds like a simple task; however, I spent a good amount of time pondering about what objects I can 3D print that are "useful." Eventually, I decided on building an egg lamp, which was inspired by Daenerys' dragon eggs from Game of Thrones . Daenerys' dragon eggs in Game of Thrones . Photo from Popsugar In Tinkercad, I used two egg shapes, the Voronoi design, and two cylinders to create the egg lamp. I partially followed a tutorial  as I was just starting to learn my way around Tinkercad, but rather than using a ring shape and a square for the bottom, I used a cylinder so that the egg can stand upright. This was my final result in Tinkercad. Once I was satisfied with how the egg lamp looked, I had to save it as an STL file and open it in Cura in order to prepare it for printing. In Cura, I am able to adjust the size of the egg lamp  and I can determine if supports are needed as ...
Read more