The Science of Knitting

If you’ve ever been lucky enough to receive a handmade sweater as a gift...you may never have thought of your crafty relative as the engineering type. Knitters actually spend a huge amount of time planning out the structure of their creations. After all, it isn’t easy to create a three-dimensional, highly structured object from a one-dimensional strand of yarn. Textile engineers contend with dozens of competing factors like strength, elasticity, texture, and cost. While these have traditionally been relegated to the fashion industry, Dr. Elisabetta Matsumoto’s lab at Georgia Tech sees them as a rich, hitherto unexplored field of physics.