Mention knitting or crocheting and most of us will immediately think about crafts, but will certainly not picture the Maths, Geometry and Science galleries of a museum. Yet patterns are based on maths and there are certainly a lot of numbers in knitting, so there are some connections there. The National Museum of Scotland (NMS) in Edinburgh knows this pretty well also because it preserves in its collections some peculiar knitted scientific models made by Scottish chemist and mathematician Alexander Crum Brown.
Born in Edinburgh in 1938, Crum Brown was a precocious child and liked building models and creating new inventions. Before he was of school-age he made a practical machine for weaving cloth, an early indication of his life-long interests in knots and in complicated systems of knitting.
He taught Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh from 1869 to 1908: his pioneering work concerned the development of a system of representing chemical compounds in diagrammatic form.
The chemist often made models using paper, leather, plaster of Paris, and wool. There are intriguing examples of his models in other institutions (including the Science Museum in London) that could easily turn into wonderful inspirations for design objects and fashion collections.
James Walker, a fellow chemist and the writer of Crum Brown's obituary, stated about this practice: "A favourite hobby was the practical construction of tri-dimensional models, both crystallographic and mathematical, a glue pot on the hob and a plentiful supply of cardboard being recognised features of his retiring room in the University."
Crum Brown often used knitting to express his concepts and researches: he constructed a model of the structure of sodium chloride that featured steel knitting needles and alternate balls of red and blue wool (the model is preserved in the museum of the School of Chemistry, Edinburgh). As well as making his own models, Crum Brown also collected the work of others such as James Clerk Maxwell’s Thermodynamic Surface.
The NMS preserves in its collection complicated pieces of knitting by Crum Brown illustrating his mathematical work on inter-penetrating surfaces as described in an 1885 paper for the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Entitled "On a Case of Interlacing Surfaces", the paper explored the behaviour of perforated surfaces.
The interpenetrating surface models consisted of three layers of knitted fabric that have been constructed in such a way that the colours appear in a different section of the design in each layer.
While showing his own researches, Crum Brown's artefacts also supported other colleagues' works such as the papers of his brother-in-law Professor Peter Guthrie Tait on knot theory.
Last month Julie Orford, the Assistant Curator of the NMS Science and Technology collections wrote a post about these pieces and then invited Ruth Churchman, Information and Knowledge Management Assistant at the museum and keen knitter, to rework them. 
Churchman tried to recreate her own version of the pieces with the National Museums of Scotland logo, but her first experiments weren't so successful.
It was only when Churchman actually saw the objects and examined them closely that she realised that each layer was one colour, but strands of wool had been pulled between the stitches to reach each of the layers. She therefore opted to try recreating the pieces using six needles. Though satisfied about the results, Churchman recently wondered if she has come close to the way Alexander Crum Brown created his models. You can check out more about her work in this post she wrote for the museum blog. 
And while we leave her to ponder about Crum Brown's stitches, we can all move onto the next question and ask ourselves why certain labels boasting about being abour heritage, knitting and Scotland never tried to discover more about such artefacts or never looked at Crum Brown's knitted mathematical models for inspiration. Sounds like one of the classic unsolved mysteries of fashion.
Related articles
