Head A Splode

One of the problems that I have in attempting to be mathlike is with the necessary patterns of thinking. My arts student brain, used to picking apart readings and, uh, remembering things, has THE HARDEST TIME trying to bend in the ways required of it in math. For example, yesterday Max asked me about a problem that he was trying to figure out for his job (which is doing math). The problem goes something like this:

Part One (this one I had no trouble with): Imagine a cube inside a sphere. The cube and sphere are sized so that the corners of the cube touch the sphere's surface. Now, using your mind, curve the sides of the cube so that they also touch the surface of the sphere.

Part Two (guard your minds, mine suffered ill effects): Imagine the original cube from the previous exercise but instead of putting it in a sphere put it in a torus (new vocabulary word! This is the technical math-term for a donut shape). Now try to do the inflation-of-the-sides thing.

Honestly, I can't even really conceptualize what we're trying to do here. My best thought was maybe putting the cube in one side of the torus and then stretching it all the way around when you come to the inflation bit. On an encouraging note, Max says that we're not really sure what we're doing here so I guess this isn't entirely an arts brain fail. Also, his idea of how to do this was the same as my best thought. Apparently this notion of how one would solve this doesn't regularize though. I asked why we couldn't just use Matlab to model it for us and was told that it is more of an applied tool whereas Maple is more symbolic.

But yeah. http://no.hablo.matlab.head.asplode.net/