Later, with others, I explained how wrinkles appear in nanotubes, elephant trunks, and even the lithosphere, the skin of our planet – of course then we call them mountains. So we wrote a paper that is one of those cited generalizing these ideas. I started looking at the problem of wrinkling a few years ago, noticing as you have, that these nuisances appear everywhere – indeed you too will see more of them as you grow older, so you had better get used to them! I had obtained a simple mathematical formula for the size of wrinkles in various situations, and on talking with my former postdoctoral fellow, Enrique Cerda, found that he had independently obtained some of the same results. I am glad that this little piece of work has amused you, as it did us. How infinitely familiar and yet how far from being understood our immediate environment is! No one reminds us of this everyday more than children- and so I thank them all, and in particular, our own two, Kausalya and Aditya.
While stretching and bending were mixed into a brew He “celebrated” this with a ditty and an essay-let:īy sagging, and swelling and shrinking too Ignobel Prize Announcement - Aug 2007 Link to Press Item Ī theoretical study of the way skin, apple peel, and bedsheets wrinkle won Mahadevan “a share” of this year’s Ig Nobel Prize in Physics.
Our work has also inspired artist Jonathon Nix paintings from an old exhibition include the Mahadevan Series. Other articles include those by scientist and author Philip Ball on everyday science titled Foams of Fancy in Nature Materials, a Boston Globe editorial titled Why ? which was also reprinted as an editorial titled Let’s go on asking why in the International Herald Tribune, an article by mathematician Gilbert Strang of MIT titled A remarkable eye for out-of-the-ordinary mathematics published in the applied mathematics newsletter SIAM News, and an article in German by science journalist and author Giselle Weiss titled Das ratsel des zerknullten papiers for the Swiss newspaper NZZ. Our work, which often draws inspiration from the mundane, has been featured in various media, perhaps because it deals with the everyday world around us, which while familiar is not always understood ! A quote by the English lexicographer and man of letters, Samuel Johnson (1709-84) may be apt: “Vulgar and inactive minds confound familiarity with knowledge, and conceive themselves informed of the whole nature of things when they are shown their form or told their use.”Ī recent article that visits many of these themes again is here and an older article that first visited these themes can be found here.