A Mathematical Easter Egg

When Ronald Dale Resch accepted the job of designing a gigantic Easter egg sculpture for the town of Vegreville, Alberta, the majority of whose residents are of Ukrainian descent, he soon discovered that he would have to develop the mathematics for the task from scratch.

His initial instincts about the design of the egg were that he could make two ellipsoids for the ends and a bulging cylinder for the centre, but he shortly realized that this would be unfeasible. The existing mathematical descriptions of an egg were quite limited. Eventually, he was able to create the egg using 2,208 identical equilateral triangular tiles. This was quite an accomplishment and meant that most of the tiles did not have to be custom cut. He also used 524 tiles shaped like three-pointed stars, whose areas did vary depending on where they were to be placed.

Resch found that an impression of curvature could be given by varying the angle of placement of the tiles slightly. The final structure is 25.7 feet long and 18.3 feet wide, and weighs 5000 pounds.

More Easter-related mathematics stuff.