We owe the T-shirt design and our 2009 contest logo to professor Blaise Bourdin of LSU Math Department.

It pictures a path of a crack propagating in a brittle cylinder reinforced in its center by an elastic fiber, obtained using the Variational Approach to Fracture, computed on a parallel supercomputer. By varying the relative sizes and elastic modulii of the fiber and matrices, various crack geometries can be obtained.