Wonderlattice
Small, hands-on experiments with big mathematical ideas. Pick one and play. There is nothing to get right.
Play it at wonderlattice.com.
Wonderlattice is a free collection of fifty rooms, each built around one surprise:
- Shape & space: draw flowers with two turning arms, walk along a ribbon that has only one side, bend the plane
until a circle becomes a wing, drag one seed to grow infinite fractal coastlines, play one shot twice on two billiard
tables, an ellipse that remembers it and a stadium that forgets it within seconds, draw a triangle on a ball
with three right angles, round which a carried arrow comes home turned, ride a cart with square wheels perfectly
level over a road of upside-down hanging chains, or draw any wheel and get its own road, roll a plank perfectly
level on rollers that aren't round, one of which drills an almost square hole, and fill every gap between touching
circles with the biggest circle that fits, for ever, where every circle's bend comes out a whole number.
- Chance & evidence: three dice that beat each other in a circle, a toy city where a huge poll is confidently
wrong, a basketball court where the better shooter loses overall (built by a contributor), a treasure detector
that's usually right, yet whose beeps are usually wrong, needles dropped on floorboards that count out π, random
jumps towards the corners of a triangle that draw a flawless fractal, a coach whose scolding seems to work nine times
in ten though it does nothing, and balls bouncing left or right at random that build the same bell every time.
- Games & puzzles: Sudoku as colouring a network, a puzzle cube where two turns, repeated, take 105 rounds to
come home, a floor that one glance at the colours proves no dominoes can cover, 100 cards turned one at a time,
where just looking at the first 37, then leaping, finds the biggest more than a third of the time, a hotel with
every room taken that still fits one more guest, then endlessly many, until a coach arrives that no rearranging can
seat, and six students paired with six clubs so that nobody would rather swap, where whoever asks first gets the
best deal.
- Making: a loom that weaves twill, stripes and houndstooth from a tiny grid of choices, an Escher-style tile
whose edges you bend while it still covers the plane, and a strip of paper, folded in half again and again, that
opens into a dragon.
- Engineering: a shower whose eager bather is scalded, then frozen, by a two-second pipe, a stack of blocks that
leans as far past the table's edge as you like, a thousand samples in which ten pooled tests, run at once, find
the one glowing tube, a hanging chain that, turned upside down, stands as an arch of loose stones, while a
semicircle of the same stones falls, a bridge of squares that folds under a toy truck until the right diagonals lock
it, when every bar shows whether it's squeezed, stretched or carrying nothing at all, a power line that glows and
leaves its town dark until the voltage goes up: ten times the voltage, a hundred times less heat, a steel plank that
is 36 times stiffer standing on its edge, and three currents that chase each other round a circle and add up to
nothing at every instant.
- Living patterns: a flock with no leader, fireflies that fall into step, fingerprints that grow by themselves,
waves that curl into spirals, as in a heartbeat, one cheater among cooperators who grows into an ever-changing
kaleidoscope where cooperation never dies out, and seeds that pack into a sunflower at only one angle of turn.
- Signals & networks: waves you can hear, a picture sent through a storm of flipped bits, a new road that slows
every driver down, a secret agreed out loud, a picture that survives losing most of its numbers, weather twins
that drift apart, beats spread as evenly as possible round a circle that turn into rhythms from around the world,
a ring of two hundred friends that a few random friendships shrink to a small world, and a scale that climbs step
after step and never gets any higher.
The home page is a map: one route through every room, numbered so each stop is unlike the one before, whether you
stay five minutes or an hour. Each room has an optional explanation with sources, and a visiting mathematician. There
are no scores, accounts, ads or tracking. You can keep favourite moments in "My trail", which stays in your own
browser. The sun and moon button switches between day and night colours, the Display button makes the text larger or
raises the contrast, and every explanation ends with a box for sending a message to the maker.
Run it yourself
Download or clone this repository and double-click index.html. It works offline, in any modern browser, with no
installation or build step. (Opened this way, browsers don't load the site's own typefaces, so it uses your
device's; the single file below has them inside.)
For a single file you can email or keep, download
wonderlattice-standalone.html and open it from your
computer. It holds the whole site, pictures included. (npm run build makes the same file in dist/.)
Contribute
Ideas, bug reports, fixes and translations are welcome: see CONTRIBUTING.md. Adding a language
takes one folder of small files and no programming (docs/TRANSLATING.md). To report a security problem, see
SECURITY.md.
For developers, with Node.js 20 or later:
npm ci # once: installs the test and formatting tools
npm start # serves the site at http://localhost:4173
npm run check # everything CI runs: lint, formatting, translations, tests, build, browser tests
The browser tests need a browser: run npx playwright install chromium once, or use your own Chrome with
PW_CHANNEL=chrome npm run check.
docs/ARCHITECTURE.md explains how the pieces fit, with a checklist for adding a room.
How it was made
Wonderlattice was designed and directed by Eyal Weiss. The code was written with AI
coding assistants, first ChatGPT agents and then Claude Code, and every change was reviewed and tested before it was
merged. docs/PROVENANCE.md has the history, and AGENTS.md is the brief any coding
assistant should read first.
Documents
Licence
The code and text are under the MIT licence. The portrait photographs are third-party works with their
own terms, listed in docs/PORTRAITS.md.
Contact: Eyal Weiss, [email protected].
