I found out first hand how important art instruction is for teaching math from some of our math competitions. When there were problems involving cubes, such as counting their surface area or volume, the students’ ability to make a sketch in the high pressured environment of the competition came into play. It didn’t have to be a…
Read more »
I was fortunate enough to visit downtown Los Angeles just in time to see this beautiful geometry installation by Hybycozo at the City National Plaza. The purple object on the left is an icosahedron, and the green one on the right — a truncated octahedron. The icosahedron is one of the 5 Platonic solids discovered several thousand years ago. Here is a picture of the Platonic solids from Johannes Kepler’s work, Harmonices Mundi, in 1619:…
Read more »
This is a time of year when many of us are running around frantically shopping for gifts. Caught up in the spirit of the holidays, I was looking for some math-themed gift wrap as part of a holiday promotion for Geometiles. In the middle of all the madness, this winter holiday giftwrap caught my eye because of its rotational symmetry. To most people “symmetry” means “mirror symmetry”. But to mathematicians, mirror symmetry is just one of the four types of symmetry used to classify patterns. The other three types of symmetry are rotational, translational, and glide reflection….
Read more »