In Fall of 2014 I taught Math 341 Introduction to Topology. As part of the class I had the students design and then print a topological object. For most students, this ended up being the highlight of the course.

We spent a week of class in the IQ center under the guidance of David Pfaff. He showed us how objects can be viewed in the stereo 3D lab and gave us a crash course in Cinema 4D. Students then let loose their imaginations and creativity. Many students chose to learn about knots and links, ribbon knots, and Seifert surfaces of knots and links. They produced some wonderful models. Other students chose to create objects with symmetry (like the 20 sided die), or the cube-like Cayley graph.

It turned out that getting the objects that could be 3d printed was hard work! Many objects had not been optimally made (for example with normal vectors pointing inwards). We were fortunate to have David Pfaff’s expertise in sorting out these errors. Eventually all the objects were printed using the IQ center’s ProJet 260. Some of them needed to be printed twice, as they broke when being removed from the printer. Many 3d printed math objects from this class and from Aaron Abrams first year seminar currently reside in the Mathematics Department.