Texts for a new time: Zometool
My new favorite thing: an enchanted addictive geodesic construction kit
Texts for a new time is where I share recommendations. While these are mostly books recommendations, they are also sometimes texts in other media: like musicals, films, and even objects. Today I am delighted to introduce a very worthwhile text that uses zero words: a tactile tool called Zometool.
What is Zometool?
A Zometool is a kind of dimension-exploration apparatus, a necessary device, a strange attractor for imagination. It will tickle your brain and cause you to temporarily enter the fourth dimension and, if you’re lucky, get back out again.
What can you make with Zometool?
Obviously, you can create crystals, beehives, viruses, or tesseracts.
You can create spinners of all sizes, including ginormous ones (like Tiger and Stefan did) and experiment with how adding and taking away parts makes it spin for longer or less time.
You’ll keep going, you’ll want to create something vast and symmetrical using all the colors, but as you do, weird things will start to happen. Your symmetrical attempt will turn out oddly squashed and gourdlike. You will keep trying, twisting, adding to it, and eventually you might create some kind of dandelion starburst, partly crenelated castle, misshapen cave.
Conveniently, Zometool is also a hanger for the most fascinating soap bubbles.
What is Zometool like?
I will not dignify Magna-Tiles by comparing them to Zometool, that’s how much of a Zometool snob I am. Zometool blows them out of the water, and also it is not a toy. Also it is out of the question to even use Lego Blocks or Tinkertoys in the same sentence as Zometool. No shade, it’s just a different plane.
How did you find out about Zometool, Mitra?
I credit my friend Jemsea and her mom, my beloved friend Rebecca, for acquainting me with Zometool. Because, in the deeps of COVID, they introduced me to the fierce recreational mathemusician (!) Vi Hart1. After watching like seventeen of her videos I posed myself the question, “But where did such a creature of genius come from?” Whereupon I discovered her father, mathematical sculptor (!) George William Hart who was part of the gang who wrested this Zometool thing out of higher dimensions and anchored it here on Planet Earth.
How might you use a Zometool?
I’ve found that if you put a Zometool on the kitchen table or the kitchen counter, curious people of all ages will actually find it even more irresistible than their smartphones. Zometool is a whole new kind of social media. And isn’t it more fun to have a crew of people in a kitchen building a five-dimensional rocketship or a toothed geode together instead of each individually scrolling Facebook? I live in a community house and I know: yes, it is.
Or, it’s great if everyone is hanging around, and you don’t have much of anything to say but are kind of enjoying tracking the conversation. Instead of pretending your Instagram is interesting, you can get to work building a hypercube shadow. THEN you will have something to say.
I know there are lots of other very brainy ways to use Zometool. I have no idea how those Nobel Prize winners use it. I hope someday I will understand even a tiny fraction of what Zometool is all about.
So that’s why Zometool is my text for new times. It is relaxing, invigorating, profound, mysterious. It is tactile and wild. It is non-ageist and ageless and childlike and child-welcoming. It is the building blocks of the next community I will live in, which will be made of geodesic domes in different sizes.
You haven’t heard of Vi Hart? The math class doodler, hexaflexagon crafter, ambigrammatic spinner of the tale of Wind & Mr Ug?