| Necktie Knots: The 85 Ways to Tie a Tie, Windsor Knot, Four-In-Hand Knot, Half-Windsor Knot, Pratt Knot, Small Knot Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Not illustrated. Excerpt: The 85 Ways to Tie a Tie (ISBN 1-84115-249-8) is a book by Thomas Fink and Yong Mao, was published by Fourth Estate on Nov 4, 1999, and subsequently published in nine other languages. The 85 Ways to Tie a Tie is about the history of the knotted neckcloth, the modern necktie, and how to tie both. It is based on two mathematics papers published by the same authors in the journals Nature and Physica A. The authors prove there are exactly 85 ways of tying a necktie and enumerate them. Of the 85, 13 stand out: the four traditional knots (the four-in-hand, Pratt, half-Windsor and Windsor) and nine others, which the authors name. The René Magritte style front jacket illustration by Peter Garland contains an amusing error or intentionally placed Easter egg: the tie knot shown is an impossible knot. The stripes on the knot and the wide blade of the tie cannot be oriented in the same directionthey must differ by a 90 degree rotation. (This assumes that the pattern repeats along the length of the tie, and does not reverse direction at some point.) The discovery of all possible ways to tie a tie depends on a mathematical formulation of the act of tying a tie. In their papers (which are technical) and book (which is for the layman, apart from an appendix), the authors show that necktie knots are equivalent to persistent random walks on a triangular lattice, with some constraints on how the walks begin and end. Thus enumerating tie knots of n moves is equivalent to enumerating walks of n steps. Imposing the conditions of symmetry and balance reduces the 85 knots to 13 aesthetic ones. The basic idea is that tie knots can be described as a sequence of six different possible moves, although not all moves can follow each other. Moreover, ther... More: http://booksllc.net/?id=6974438 Price: $14.14 »» More Info / User Reviews / Buy From Amazon.com |
