Since people might be looking for something distracting they can do at home around now, we’re running another fun competition to keep you occupied – much like our π-ku poetry competition in July, we’re looking for anyone who has a spare slice of brain to come up with a design for our fractal bunting competition.

Standard bunting (pictured above) takes the form of a regular pattern of shapes arranged along a ribbon, and often employs triangles, but we’re looking for you to decide how you interpret our challenge: to make this somehow be a fractal. We don’t want to bias your thought processes, so that’s all we’re giving you. Fractal bunting. Fractal. Bunting.

It’s up to you if your entry is a sketch on the back of a napkin, or if you’re keen, whether you make real actual bunting out of paper, card or fabric (or just some smaller bunting) and send us a photo. We’ll judge the entries based on fractal-y-ness, use of colour, creativity, mathematical satisfying-ness, and whatever other criteria we make up at the time. We’ll have a special guest judge, illustrator and friend of maths Hana Ayoob, to make sure we properly consider aesthetics and not just cold hard numbers.

You can enter our competition on Twitter, using the hashtag #fractalbunting, mentioning @Aperiodical in your tweet; if you don’t use Twitter, or don’t want to, you can email your designs to root@aperiodical.com with the subject line ‘Fractal bunting’.

The closing date for entries has been extended to noon on 23rd October, and we’ll announce the results the following week. Our favourite entry will win a signed copy of Here Come the Numbers, a rhyming book telling the story of numbers, illustrated by Hana and written by mathematician Kyle Evans.