Dr. Lauren Niu, Center for Functional Fabrics, Drexel University & Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, USA, has received the Mario Markus Prize for Ludic Sciences from the German Chemical Society (GDCh). Awarded on December 15 at Physikalischer Verein (Physical Society) in Frankfurt, Germany, the €10,000 prize recognizes her research on the geometry of knitted fabrics. She discovered that knitted fabrics tend to form three-dimensional patterns according to Gaussian curvature.
The award honors scientific work in the field of natural sciences that is characterized by its playful character and celebrates scientific curiosity. The prize is financed by Professor Mario Markus, Dortmund, Germany, who dedicated himself to ludic science and coined this term.
Lauren Niu developed a general theory of the geometry of knitted fabrics, explaining how simple knit and purl stitches generate complex three-dimensional folding patterns. Through experiments ranging from machine-knitted samples to large physical models, she identified a universal tendency of knitted structures to curl and produce Gaussian curvature at all scales. She showed that knitted fabrics can be modeled as thin elastic sheets that preserve area while forming locally saddle-shaped geometries with orthogonal knit–purl regions, a theory validated numerically and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Lauren Niu, born 1993, studied physics at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, USA, and earned her Ph.D. in physics in 2023 from Harvard University in Cambridge, USA, with a dissertation titled Patterns and Singularities in Elastic Shells. Since 2023, she has worked as a senior research scientist and postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Functional Fabrics at Drexel University, and since 2025 she has also served as a visiting scientist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania, both in Philadelphia, USA.
Lauren Niu has received multiple awards, including the Herbert B. Callen Memorial Prize in 2025, and is actively involved in service roles such as the Women+ of Color Project.
Reference
[1] Lauren Niu, Geneviève Dion, Randall D. Kamien, Geometric modeling of knitted fabrics, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 2025, 122(7), e2416536122. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2416536122
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