Cornrow Curves

Cornrows are a type of hair braid. They look like rows of corn. They do have a history, and it involves ancient Africans from around 500 B.C, around the time the Roman empire began. It shows the close attention that Africans have always paid to hair. Religion, kinship, status, age, ethnicity, and other attributes of identity can all be expressed in their hairstyle. Math is quite common in African culture with all their patterns, especially in hair. Those who worked in the plantation were required to keep a neat image for themselves. So, they would use cornrows as a way to keep a good appearance. It was also a way for blacks to unite by making their hair similar. During the civil rights era, cornrows were seen as survivors of the African tradition. During the 1970's, as Hip Hop became popular, cornrows worked hand and hand with it and was also popular. 

• Hip Hop Hair
• During the 1990s, several well-known celebrities, like Allen Iverson, Ludacris, and Lil' Bow Wow, were known for wearing cornrows.
• The complex geometric shapes that donned cornrow wearers, went on to further prove that math was just as important to the African heritage as was Black hair itself.

Design Tool Tutorial:

• Iteration
• Adding plaits to the original plait.
• Dilation
• Increasing or decreasing the size of the plaits.
• Question: Let's say the original plait is 1" wide, and let's make this first iteration 50% of the original size. How wide is the first iteration plait?
• Answer: The plait will be 0.5" wide.
• Translation
• Increasing or decreasing the distance between the plaits.
• Question: Let's say that the original plait is 1" wide, and let's make this first iteration translate 75% of the width of the original plait. How far away will the first iteration plait be from the original plait?
• Answer: The first iteration plait will be 0.75" away from the original.
• Rotation
• Changing the degree of the angle of which the new plait is being oriented.
• Question: Let's say we rotate the plaits 15 degrees in each iteration. The original plait is not rotated at all, so we will call that 0 degrees. The first iteration is rotated 15 degrees, and the second 30 degrees. How many degrees will the third plait be rotated?
• Answer: The third plait will be rotated 45 degrees.
• Reflection
• Making a copy that is a mirror image of the original.

1. Understand - I understood the tutorial
2. Plan - I planned out which hair design I'll do
3. Test - I tested out how the program worked
4. Reflect -  I reflected on the image I tried to copy and compared to see any errors

The mathematical concepts used involved some concepts in geometry such as reflections on the x and y axis as well as dilation, rotations and translations. I used simple addition and subtraction to properly adjust the patterns.