The practice of purposely looping thread to create intricate knit garments and blankets has existed for millennia. Though its precise origins have been lost to history, artifacts like a pair of wool socks from ancient Egypt suggest it dates back as early as the third to fifth century CE. Yet, for all its longstanding ubiquity, the physics behind knitting remains surprisingly elusive. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, theoretical physicist and visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Lauren Niu and her mentors, Randall Kamien of Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences and Geneviève Dion of the Center for Functional Fabrics at Drexel University, have presented a model that seeks to decode the ancient practice of knitting by ascribing a mathematical language to the stitches in knits and purls.
https://phys.org/news/2025-02-theoretical-physics.html#google_vignette