an embroidery work created based on the right-angle construction of Johnson and Jackson

From the 2023 Maple Conference Art Gallery - Winner of the People's Choice Award

This is an embroidery work that I created based on the right-angle
triangle construction used by high school students, Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson, in their 2023
proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. In this proof, a right-angle triangle is constructed by concatenating
an infinite series of increasingly small congruent triangles.

To create the embroidery, I traced a visualization made in Maple Learn onto a piece of
cotton. Due to the physical limitations of the embroidery medium (a stitch can only be so small), “Infinite
Similar Triangles” is an eleven-triangle approximation of the Jackson-Johnson triangle. I
used 7 alternating colours to construct the congruent triangles. Throughout the whole design, I used a
satin stitch, which is used to create solid, flat shapes with parallel stitches. Furthermore, using this stitch
means that the same triangle pattern can be seen on the back side of the fabric as well as the front.

The amazing story behind the proof is explained in the “New Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem!” Maple
Primes blog post. The mechanics of the proof are detailed in the “Jackson and Johnson’s Proof of the
Pythagorean Theorem” document on Maple Learn. An exploration of the
triangle’s construction for different side lengths can be found in the “Jackson and Johnson’s Triangle
Construction” Maple Learn document.