Article submitted by Fulda High School Math Teacher, Greg Erdmann
Fulda High School math teacher, Greg Erdmann, and several students built a Sierpinski’s Pyrmid from Q-tips, cardboard, string, and glue. Mr. Erdmann submitted the following that describes the process and time that it took, along with some of the challenges involved in building the structure.
“The large structure you see appearing in the picture is called a Sierpinski Pyramid. It is an iterative structure which basically means that it is made up of structures that are themselves substructures of the next structure. Sounds complicated, but if you have 6,290 Q-tips, 600 feet of string, and a quart of Tacky Glue, you too could build one of these! What we did is take three Q-tips and glue them into an equilateral triangle. Now, take three more and make the triangle into a tetrahedron. This is a total of six Q-tips to make our first 3-D shape. Now, do this 4 times and you will have a larger pyramid with 24 Q-tips. Do that four more times and you will have a pyramid that is 4 times larger and has 96 Q-tips. Notice the pattern? Once you have 4 pyramids, you keep making a larger one.
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