Friends whose parents are engineers have given me papers, and colleagues of friends and relatives-when they hear about my interest-find old papers to share. I have also found beautiful graph paper in paper stores, college bookstores and artist supply shops, and I look for ephemera on Etsy and eBay. I teach math, so there’s lots of cool papers in the drawers at work. Where have you looked to find so much graph paper? Each of these grids describe a particular reality that creates order in a graph.
Smith chart graph paper plus#
I have graph papers in a variety of grids: the usual squares, of course, plus semilogarithmic, logarithmic, isometric, hyperbolic, normal probability plot, polar coordinate, Smith Chart, triangular, knitting and quilting grids, Skew-T (that’s meteorological paper) and more.
Smith chart graph paper professional#
Just as professionals today prize a good keyboard or an elegant pen, these professionals used high-quality papers as part of their professional material culture.Īnother beautiful aspect of graph paper is the design of the grid and the representation of patterns in the world that are implicit in those grids. Remember, highly paid engineers, architects and Disney designers, among others, used graph paper professionally before computer printers spit out graphs on really ordinary paper. Other papers come in lovely, glistening vellum. Some of the old manufacturers used high rag content paper-50 to 100 percent rag-that drapes beautifully in the hand. Graph paper has two main attributes of beauty. What inspired you to start collecting graph paper? (This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited.) She began buying a few packs of paper at a time, returning to that store and visiting others, and now she holds the world record for largest graph paper collection: a thousand unique pages.īraun spoke with the Gazette about her massive collection and the artists it’s attracted, and also discussed her passion for Judaic embroidery-which involves graph paper, too.
There were new ones, too, but those didn’t entice Braun the same way. The back room was overflowing with vintage sheets.
In the summer of 1999, Rachel Eisenberg Braun C’80 G’80, a self-described “mathy person who has always appreciated a good piece of graph paper,” walked into an Amherst, Massachusetts, paper shop.