Objectives of a project-oriented mechanical engineering course, Engineering Design, were achieved through a design project, where students designed, built and demonstrated an extreme version of a basic Theo Jansen device. Through this project, junior students in the University of Louisiana fully developed the capability of applying mathematic and…

Cubic symmetry is used to build the other four Platonic solids and some formalism from classical geometry is introduced. Initially, the approach is via geometric construction, e.g., the "golden ratio" is necessary to construct an icosahedron with pentagonal faces. Then conventional elementary vector algebra is used to extract quantitative…

Pierre Bezier was born on September 1 in Paris, 1910. Choosing the career path of his father, he gained electrical and mechanical engineering degrees by the time he was 21 years old. He began working for the car company Renault and stayed there for the next 42 years. In 1977 he received a doctorate in mathematics. Bezier, at the age of 50 began…