Art supplies for a mathematician These days the best tool for visualizing math is probably a computer.  Nevertheless, I find it helpful/fun/nice-break-from-the-computer to sometimes make physical objects or drawings by hand.  The most basic tools are of course a pen and paper, and a lot can be done with just this, especially if you start folding.  Here are some other basic supplies I keep in my office:

*

*Colored pencils/pens

*Cardstock

*String

*Thumbtacks

*Compass

*Straightedge

*Protractor

*Tape

*Scissors

What are some other supplies that are useful to have around?
 A: On page 183 of his book Cubic Forms, in the bibliographical remarks to the section on the twenty-seven lines, Manin quotes Henderson's historical summary:

Indeed Sylvester once remarked, in his characteristical florid style:
"Surely with as good reason as had Archimedes to have the cylinder,
cone, and sphere engraved on his tombstone might our distinguished
countrymen leave testamentary directions for the cubic eikosiheptagram
to be engraved on theirs."
If Cayley and Salmon had wished to follow Sylvester's advice and to
insert a clause in their wills, directing that an eikosiheptagram be
engraved upon their monuments, they would have had no certainty of the
correct fulfilment of their directions until the year 1869, when
Christian Wiener made a model of a cubic surface showing twenty-seven
real lines lying upon it. This achievement of Wiener, Sylvester once
remarked, is one of the discoveries "which must for ever make 1869
stand out in the Annals of Science."
Klein exhibited a complete set of models of cubic surfaces at the
World's Exposition in Chicago in 1894, including Clebsch's symmetrical
model of the diagonal surface and Klein's model of the cubic surface
having four real conical points. Models of the typical cases of all
the principal forms of cubic surfaces have been constructed by
Rodenberg for Brill's collections; and these plaster models may now be
purchased.

Manin concludes: "Henderson's book appeared in 1911. Sylvester's eloquence and the plaster models disappeared together with the Victorian era... "
