The Topology of Movement: Exploring Spatial Orientation through Puppetry
Proceedings of Bridges 2025: Mathematics and the Arts
Pages 609–616
Workshop Papers
Abstract
In this workshop, participants build a simple puppet and use it to solve a series of movement puzzles in order to explore the topology of real projective space. The movement puzzles involve manipulating the puppet to perform paths and enact homotopies in projective space in order to gain a visceral understanding of its topology, including the fact that any two non-trivial loops combine to form a trivial loop.