When I first visited Finney Chapel at Oberlin College in Ohio, I was struck by the round window; it lacked the mirror symmetry typical of rose windows in Romanesque style buildings, of which Finney is one, and looked more like a geometry problem. Until I read more about its history, I thought it might be…
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What a great exercise it would be for a child to figure out how to “model” this wall with only equilateral triangles and squares. This is exactly the kind of thinking that the writers of the Common Core Math standards illustrate in the draft of their Geometry Progression for Grades K-6, pp. 7, 11-12. Geometiles™ were used for the modeling task, as shown above….
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A trip to the ladies room of the Arclight Cinemas in the local mall revealed a somewhat unusually shaped sink. In case you’re wondering where the water drains, there’s a slit right along the back edge, shown by the blue arrow. But what happens if the drain backs up; how much water can a sink…
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Stuck at a traffic light, and, lo and behold, a DODECAHEDRON! A closer look reveals it’s standing on a platform made of pentagonal antiprisms stacked on top of one another. I later learned the sculpture is called SOMA and is a creation of the Flaming Lotus Girls. In the meantime, I made my own little…
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