From Science News:

It's not clear just why mathematical craftwork has suddenly taken off, says sarah-marie belcastro, a mathematician at Smith College in Northampton (Mass.), who organized the exhibit with Carolyn Yackel. "Part of me says it's because there are so many more women in math now," she says. "But every time we give talks, there are men in the audience who say they knit or crochet."

For a gathering last March in Atlanta to honor mathematics writer Martin Gardner, belcastro and Carolyn Yackel created doughnut-shaped surfaces, called tori. The patterns on their tori illustrate two well-known mathematical ideas about maps and networks on a torus.

Belcastro's knitted torus, which can be seen as a companion piece to Yackel's, displays an intriguing fact about networks on the torus. The torus depicts a collection of points connected by paths. This network is derived from the map on Yackel's torus by marking one point inside each country and then connecting each pair of points by a path, like a railroad line, that crosses the boundary between their respective countries.

Such a network of seven points, each connected to every other by a path, can't be drawn in the flat plane without some paths crossing. On the torus, however, as belcastro's knitting demonstrates, the paths can snake around the hole and avoid each other.

From Professor belcastro's homepage:

I co-direct the Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics (HCSSiM), a six-week intensive summer enrichment program for talented high-school students, and am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Smith College.

I seem to have become a topological graph theorist while I wasn't looking. I am also interested in convex and combinatorial geometry, algebraic geometry, topology, algebra, the geometry of paper-folding, and the applications of mathematics to fiber arts (knitting, sewing). As time goes on, I seem to like more and more areas of mathematics...

...and that pretty much goes for my teaching interests as well. I've taught many of the standard undergraduate mathematics classes (as well as some less-standard classes of my own invention) and loved them all. I have yet to teach a course I disliked, in fact.

From Professor belcastro's philosophy page:

Sometimes people want to know about my belief system.

Well, one of the quickest ways to describe my beliefs is to say that I'm a humanist. That's not a very helpful description, though, as humanism is not defined the same way by everyone. A good summary of humanist beliefs can be found here. I have found lots of other links to sites on humanism, but I don't agree with everything they say. I've included those links so you can see the broad range of opinion on this if you want to.

Here's something I say often, and it also encapsulates my beliefs pretty well:

I want to change the world.

Please don't think that this means that I want to change everything about the world (I certainly don't). What I really mean is that when one sees something wrong or problematic, one should try to improve the situation. One should not be discouraged because it seems difficult to change things, or because one thinks one cannot effect the necessary change.

In particular, we should not give up on trying to change things just because it doesn't always work or because it takes a really really long time.

Furthermore, very small efforts often have big payoffs in changing our immediate environs.

Part of changing the world is changing myself. I'm always trying to improve in various ways, and for obvious reasons I would rather not list most of them here! There are two I'll tell you, though: I'm always trying to work more efficiently and effectively, and I work very hard in ballet class to improve my technique.

Anne Frank said, "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."

I think that's enough.