Math Monday: Elliptical One-Sheet Furniture

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By Gareth Branwyn
Posted 2011/03/07 @ 12:00 pm
Category Furniture, Science

By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics

An interesting design exercise is to cut and fold furniture from one sheet of plywood. Peter Meijer has explored families of elliptical tables that are folded from exactly one rectangular sheet, with no unused remainder.

In one family of experiments, he systematically varies the possible leg parameters, to search for optimal arrangements.

Here are renderings of some of the elliptical table designs he found to be most promising. I’ll be curious to see someone actually make these.

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See all of George Hart’s Math Monday columns

BY Gareth Branwyn

Gareth Branwyn is a freelancer writer and the former Editorial Director of Maker Media. He is the author or editor of a dozen books on technology, DIY, and geek culture, including the first book about the web (Mosaic Quick Tour) and the Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots. He is currently working on a best-of collection of his writing, called Borg Like Me.

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3 Responses to Math Monday: Elliptical One-Sheet Furniture

Daniel Fleck on March 7th, 2011 at 8:26 pm said:

As an engineer, I both love and hate this design. I love it because it is striving to eliminate waste and it looks pretty cool. I also hate it because it actually creates more waste by forcing everything to be a constant thickness. In order to get strong enough legs, your plywood would have to be much thicker than necessary for the tabletop and diagonal supports.

Also, the first rendering looks very stable and strong, the other three renderings below looks like they would flop over pretty easily as there are no diagonal supports.

Save yourself some wood and cuts by using the full sheet of plywood for the top and building some structure with 2x4s.

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Aaron Ramaekers on March 8th, 2011 at 12:15 am said:

I can agree with the troubles these designs have from the engineering perspective (I am on the path to becoming an engineer). I think it’s a practice of working with constraints, which is very important to real life application of engineering principles, though. Given a piece of plywood, some tools, and time, I think this would be an awesome project.

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Jack Madson on March 10th, 2011 at 5:05 am said:

It’s very technical matter to create the furniture.It’s mind blowing design for chair.I love it because it’s giving entertainment with relax.Thanks…
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http://www.sofasandsectionals.com/

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