Have you ever walked into work to find yourself chasing a Unicorn problem? That’s what happened to Tom Morgan, a doctoral candidate in mathematics at Brooklyn Polytechnic University.
You see, his graduate professors, Gregory and David Chudnovsky had taken on the project of stitching together 30 digital scans of three-by-three-foot sections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's unicorn tapestry. What they found surprised them -- the tapestry was moving while a camera took the 30 images. The museum director laughed when the brothers suggested that someone was moving the tapestry during the photo op.
Instead, they discovered that when the old tapestry was laid on the floor, its million of fibers shifted randomly keeping it in a state of constant motion. To solve the problem they created a vector map and a series of equations that allowed them to align the images with the aid of their homegrown super computer -- and recapture the Unicorn.
Are they working on other tapestries? Nope, too much work. Now they’re using math to analyze the brush strokes of paintings.