Minimal surfaces and soap films

As a fun day for my multi-variable calculus class, I brought in some soap and talked about minimal surfaces. Later, I took some pictures of some of the more interesting soap films.

• A cube
• The Möbius band
  built out of an unknot
• An interesting unknot
• The tetrahedron
  The minimal surface bounding a tetrahedral frame
• The trefoil knot
• The Hopf link
• The catenoid
  made from two unlinked loops
• Miscellaneous wire frames

See also:

Courant, R. "Soap Film Experiments with Minimal Surfaces." Amer. Math. Monthly 47, 167-174, 1940.

You can get this article from JSTOR. The pictures in this article are very nice (much better than these photos).