Oxy's Math Nerd Solar Project

Occidental College has started work on a huge solar array project designed (to delightfully nerdy standards) by Highland Park's Lettuce "in collaboration with college art faculty." According to the college's website, "About 30 percent of the array's 4,886 panels will be mounted on top of shade structures installed in an existing campus parking lot. The remainder will be placed nearby on a southwest-facing hillside. With panels mounted just two to three feet above the ground, the hillside array will hug the topography of the slope in a curving design based on a mathematical expression known as a hysteresis loop (produced when an alternating magnetic field is applied to ferromagnetic material)." The array is expected to be finished this spring. [Oxy.edu, via Eastsider LA]