Daina Taimiņa

An article about Taimiņa's innovation in New Scientist was spotted by the Institute For Figuring, a small non-profit organisation based in Los Angeles, and she was invited to speak about hyperbolic space and its connections with nature to a general audience which included artists and movie producers. Taimiņa's initial lecture and following other public presentations sparked great interest in this new tactile way of exploring concepts of hyperbolic geometry, making this advanced topic accessible to wide audiences. Originally creating purely mathematical models, Taimiņa soon became popular as a fiber artist and public presenter for general audiences of ages five and up. In June 2005, her work was first shown as art in an exhibition "Not The Knitting You Know" at Eleven Eleven Sculpture Space, an art gallery in Washington, D.C. Since then she has participated regularly in various shows in galleries in US, UK, Latvia, Italy, Belgium, Ireland, Germany. Her artwork is in the collections of several private collectors, colleges and universities, and has been included in the American Mathematical Model Collection of the Smithsonian Museum, Cooper–Hewitt, National Design Museum, and Institut Henri Poincaré.

Margaret Wertheim interviewed Daina Taimiņa and David Henderson for Cabinet Magazine Later, based on Taimina's work, the Institute For Figuring published a brochure "A Field Guide to Hyperbolic Space". In 2005 the IFF decided to incorporate Taimiņa's ideas and approach of explaining hyperbolic space in their mission of popularizing mathematics, and curated an exhibition at Machine Project gallery, which was the subject of a piece in the Los Angeles Times.

Taimiņa also contributed to David W. Henderson's book Differential Geometry: A Geometric Introduction (Prentice Hall, 1998) and, with Henderson, wrote Experiencing Geometry: Euclidean and Non-Euclidean with History (Prentice Hall, 2005).

While attending a geometry workshop at Cornell University about teaching geometry for university professors in 1997, Taimina was presented with a fragile paper model of a hyperbolic plane, made by the professor in charge of the workshop, David Henderson (designed by geometer William Thurston.) It was made «out of thin, circular strips of paper taped together». She decided to make more durable models, and did so by crocheting them. The first night after first seeing the paper model at the workshop she began experimenting with algorithms for a crocheting pattern, after visualising hyperbolic planes as exponential growth.

Taimina has led several workshops at Cornell University for college geometry instructors together with professor David Henderson (of the aforementioned 1997 workshop and who later became her husband). Crocheted mathematical models later appeared in three geometry textbooks they wrote together, of which the most popular is Experiencing Geometry: Euclidean and non-Euclidean with History. In 2020 Taimina published 4th edition of this book as open source [1]

Daina Taimiņa joined the Cornell Math Department in December 1996.

Taimiņa received all of her formal education in Riga, Latvia, where in 1977 she graduated summa cum laude from the University of Latvia and completed her graduate work in Theoretical Computer Science (with thesis advisor Prof. Rūsiņš Mārtiņš Freivalds) in 1990. As one of the restrictions of Soviet system at that time, a doctoral thesis was not allowed to be defended in Latvia, so she defended hers in Minsk, receiving the title of Candidate of Sciences. This explains the fact that Taimiņa's doctorate was formally issued by the Institute of Mathematics of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus. After Latvia regained independence in 1991, Taimiņa received her higher doctoral degree (doktor nauk) in mathematics from the University of Latvia, where she taught for 20 years.

Daina Taimiņa (born August 19, 1954) is a Latvian mathematician, retired adjunct associate professor of mathematics at Cornell University, known for discovering a groundbreaking way of modelling hyperbolic planes by crocheting objects to illustrate hyperbolic space and innovative use of them teaching geometry.