The search for the biggest shape in the universe.

“Search For Largest Polyhedra” by Donald Grace

Geogebra model of the Grace's Shape made by Sam Hartburn.

Much appreciation to Donald's children who talked to me about late nights spent with their father watching a computer crunch away at some math.

CORRECTIONS
- 00:23 I say "August 22" which is wrong: this Tuesday is August 20. Please don't tell my publishers I got that wrong.
- At 16:50 I say "eight times" which is completely wrong and not part of the formula. No idea what was going on there. The onscreen value (and everything else I say) is correct.
- Let me know if you spot anything else!

Filming and editing by Alex Genn-Bash
Additional footage by Bill Hedges
Written and performed by Matt Parker
Voiceover by Gemma Arrowsmith
Produced by Nicole Jacobus
Music by Howard Carter
Design by Simon Wright and Adam Robinson
On-set entertainment by Cosmic Cat (and kittens)

MATT PARKER: Stand-up Mathematician

[Stephen_The_Waxing_Lyricist]

To bodly go where no mathematician has gone before...

Star Trig!

[dg-hughes]

I have to say Matt I've never seen you so well or evenly lighted.

[jakelooney]

Between Bill and friendly horse guy, its nice to see non-mathematicians find love and joy from math and computing in their lives and hobbies

[Rubrickety]

Matt has himself found something truly remarkable: a reason to go to Nebraska.

[crabman]

This just makes me wish Matt had a kids' show about maths. If this is any indication, he'd do it very well and be the maths equivalent of Bill Nye for the new generation.

[Koushakur]

So, what shape is it? Does it have a name? Does it have other properties that make it interesting? etc. I feel you skipped the most interesting part of this whole thing, the shape is what I was hoping to learn more about...

[Bodyknock]

Did I miss seeing the shape up close in the video? Matt showed a lot of other shapes close up both physically and rendered on the computer but I didn’t see where he showed a nice, close up view from different angles of the final shape.

[MegaNardman]

Thank you Bill for keeping these old sci-fi (and mathematical) oddities alive!

[dliessmgg]

I wish there was a bit in the video where you had a closer look at what the shape actually looks like. Or gave us the name of the shape, so we could look at it on our own time. Something like that.

[andriypredmyrskyy]

I'm a little upset we didn't get to hear more details about the shape, I barely even know that it looks like! (Pink, presumably)

[shempincognito]

From squaring the circle to cubing the sphere.

[mooxim]

It hurts my brain that it's not more elegantly symmetrical. I feel like Pythagoras would have killed a man if they told him about this shape.

[Eyeclops_]

I just finished my PhD in computer architecture a couple weeks ago, and seeing a computer I actually read about on this channel has made me unexpectedly giddy. Matt, you made my day.

[philipsweet]

The shape of the implosive lens (the boundary of the two different explosives) needed to produce a spherical shock was attacked by punch card machines in the 40's. The Navier Stokes equations were literally what the first digital computers were built to solve. They were all about shapes. Folded wave guide horns are another early example. Nozzles of all types were investigated. Orbital mechanics and trajectories were studied by human computers. Michells integral solution to the free surface wake of an actual ship was computed by hand in 1898.

[Jellylamps]

I wish this had included a description of the shape itself

[Dr._Nicholi_Rasmuson]

I catch myself drifting away from what he's saying and going, "Man, he's sweaty....oh, wait, that's the design on the shirt." It's just the right, or just the wrong combinations of shades of grey. Amusing.

[vegardno]

RIP Roger. Nothing I can say will do him justice, he was such a generous person and incredible teacher. Roger inspired me to apply to university when I was still in high school and he taught the logic courses that shaped my thinking to this day. Thank you, Roger, for everything. You will always be my hero. 💐

[jamescomstock]

Rumor has it that skilled users of the Boroughs 220 console now posses the more modern skill of being able to read QR codes at a glance.

[mahtx]

The later Burroughs are interesting because it is not Vonn Neumann architecture but, it had what we would call a hypervisor built into the hardware and would switch between processes to provide symmetric multiprocessing - you could not elevate your privileges to the level of Hypervisor. It was a stack machine with virtual memory and 48bit word size. In 1961!

[ruckingrugger]

I actually did my PhD in math in this exact topic, Super-shapes, hyper-sizes, etc and how it relates in Reimannian Geometry and spacetime. It was so challenging especially when trying to explain to people not in the know. My proudest moment was when I co-authored the paper discovering the largest shape ever was your mom.

Edit: I spelled Riemannian wrong. Sue me. Some of you have the biggest shape in the universe stuck up your asses lol