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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/how-one-physicist-unraveling-mathematics-knitting

How one physicist is unraveling the mathematics of knitting

By Lakshmi Chandrasekaran
JANUARY 26, 2021 AT 10:00 AM - MORE THAN 2 YEARS AGO

Physicist Elisabetta Matsumoto is an avid knitter and has been since taking up the hobby as a child. During graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009, Matsumoto came across an unusually knotty stitch while knitting a pattern for a Japanese red dragon. “I have books with thousands of different stitch patterns, but the one in the red dragon wall hanging was one I had never seen,” she says. That got her thinking about the geometry of stitches and, eventually, led her to study the mathematics of knitting.

There are a hundred or so basic stitches, Matsumoto says. By varying stitch combinations, a knitter can alter the elasticity, mechanical strength and 3-D structure of the resulting fabric. Yarn on its own isn’t very elastic. But when knitted, the yarn gives rise to fabric that can stretch by more than twice its length while the yarn itself barely stretches.

Matsumoto, now at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, is teasing out the mathematical rules that dictate how stitches impart such unique properties to fabrics. She hopes to develop a catalog of stitch types, their combinations and the resulting fabric properties. Knitters, scientists and manufacturers could all benefit from a dictionary of knits, she says.

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