Three students paint a large pipe structure in shades of green, blue, and purple, working together outdoors to add colorful designs to the metal surface.

A Pipe Dream: Making Space for a Space-Filling Curve

Heidi Opdyke

The Carnegie Mellon Math Club brought math to life by building an iteration of a 3D Hilbert curve using PVC pipes. This "space-filling curve" follows one single, continuous path that visits every part of space. The fractal design was constructed first in pieces, and then all together following the same pattern. This is the second year in a row Math Club has kicked off the year with a mathematical sculpture build. In 2025, they built "Knight's Move" which represented the moves a knight can make on a 3D chess board, and happens to be a rigid unit distance graph with no triangles.