Fonts of wisdom

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Erik Demaine's hinged dissection font

When creating typographic fonts, designers usually consider factors like elegance, readability and mood.

Erik Demaine was interested in none of the above.

He wanted to create fonts inspired by mathematics.

For example, imagine you have some pink circular gears glued to a table, as illustrated below. Is it possible to find a way to wrap a belt (or elastic band) around them so that the belt is taut and touches all gears? If you know tell Erik, since it’s an open problem.

Erik, together with Belén Palop and his father Martin Demaine, decided to turn this problem into a font in which the outline of each letter is a belt threaded through equal-sized gears. The belt is always taut and touches every gear:

The coolest thing about the font is what happens when you take the belt away. It looks like a painting of random dots (eat your heart out Damien Hirst) – but with fragments of order. When you keep on looking, gradually you can make out the words. It would make a great cipher – or plot puzzle in a Dan Brown-style book…

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Erik, who is an MIT professor and a star in the world of recreational maths, is known for his work on computational origami. So it would have been churlish of him not to create an origami font.

In the origami maze font, in which Erik was assisted by his father and Jason Ku, each letter is the origami fold pattern that will produce a 3-d outline of the letter. So, in order to produce this

you have a fold pattern that looks like:

Which looks awesome and gives nothing away visually. Even if you are used to fold patterns – red are mountain folds and blue are valley folds – I dont think you can tell what it says by looking at it. So it would be an even better cipher.

Finally, Erik revisted one of the classic old school puzzles – that of the hinged dissection. In the image below the triangle is split into four pieces joined by hinges, which can be rearranged into a square.

In the hinged dissection font, every letter is made up of 128 small triangles all joined at the hinges and which can be rearranged into a square. Here’s how it works for A:

This font has real character. The constraints of the hinged dissection mean that each letter has the same area and cannot have very thin sections, which creates a chunky, macho and oddly artistic font that gives fashionable fonts a run for their money.

If you want to play around with the fonts, you can do so on Erik’s website, which also has longer papers on each of the fonts (and from which I took some of the images above).