Margaret Wertheim

For her work with public science engagement, Wertheim won the 2016 Klopsteg Memorial Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers and Australia's Scientia Medal (2017).

[3] The book offered a critique of sexism in science and proposed systemic historical reasons why physics has been so un-open to women since its inception in Pythagorean principles 2500 years ago.

"[5] Leonard finds her account of the evolution of physicists' concept of space impressive, but expresses the view that ultimately she loses faith in her thesis of cyberspace as a spiritual realm: even if there is, indeed, something human about a great network of relationships that "cannot be captured by an equation or a telescope".

[5] Yet as Britt Elvira Ruitenberg wrote on the website The First Supper, the purpose of the book was not to endorse cyber-spiritualism, but to challenge the very premise, this "dream of a virtual Eden that rapidly vanished away".

"[9] The leading character is Jim Carter, a man with an "unshakable belief" in a theory of the whole universe constructed of "endless hierarchies of circlons", circular mechanical objects that reproduce and split like smoke rings.

[9] Unknown to Carter, his basic idea that atoms could be explained as subatomic smoke rings had already been proposed in the 1870s by the renowned English physicist William Thomson (later Baron Kelvin), and the Scottish mathematician P.G.

The Institute proposes that people can interact directly with mathematical and scientific ideas via material construction methods (such a crochet and paper folding), not simply via abstract equations and formulas.

By creating giant installations that mimic living coral reefs, crocheted out of yarn and types of plastic, and using algorithms inspired by hyperbolic geometry, the project resides at the intersection of mathematics, science, handicraft, environmentalism and community art practice.

[14][15] Wertheim’s use of crochet in the piece is largely due to Daina Taimina's discovery of the potential manifestation of the Impossible Hyperbolic Structure within the confines of the medium.

[16] As of early 2020, more than 10,000 people from New York and London, to Riga and Abu Dhabi, have actively contributed pieces to Crochet Coral Reef exhibitions in more than 40 cities and countries.

In the foreword to the Crochet Coral Reef book, Donna Haraway calls the project "palpable, polymorphous, powerful and terrifying stitchery".

[19] Inspired by and working with Jeannine Mosely, a software engineer and origami artist, Margaret Wertheim curated a project at the University of Southern California to create a giant model of a fractal, constructed from 48,912 business cards.