How math-phobic parents can teach kids to love math. Or, just play them some Vi Hart videos.
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Mathemusician Vi Hart is back with anti-parabola propaganda and some musing on math class, cardioids, connect the dots, envelopes of lines, even a bit of origami. Also see Hart’s Fibonacci numbers explained in stop-motion vegetables, the Victorian novella Flatland on a Möbius strip, and the science of sound, frequency, and pitch in stop-motion doodles.
Algebra is not just the language of mathematical elites, it is one of the cornerstones by which we have emerged from a peasant society, ruled by the small elites sometimes capable of abstract thought, to become a complex, vibrant democracy. Algebra has helped us to rise beyond the simple understanding of immediate, tangible experiences and frame questions and look for the essential data that will give us deeper understanding.
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…the study of algebra, and the skills it develops, are not just critical to our long-term health individually but to our survival as a society.
In defense of math – a rebuttal to the recent anti-algebra hype.
illustrator Sarah Brown and director Cyriak Harris bring to life Adam Buxton’s delightfully dark “Counting Song”
M.C. Escher’s remarkable mathematical art. Open Culture has more.
Also see Russian artist and mathematician Anatolii Fomenko’s Mathematical Impressions.
Poetry is an extreme form of wordplay, in which numbers dictate form and structure to give more beauty to it.
Mathematics Impressions – gorgeous vintage abstract illustrations by Soviet mathematician Anatolii Fomenko at the intersection of science, art, and whimsy.
TED-Ed animated lesson explores the basic unit of math. Also see how Fibonacci changed the world with the invention of arithmetic.
“These types of repeating patterns are called frieze patterns. A couple wallpaper groups are also represented.”
Mathemusician Vi Hart captures mathematical symmetry groups in doodles and hums.
Hart’s previous gems include Fibonacci numbers explained in stop-motion vegetables, the Victorian novella Flatland on a Möbius strip, and the science of sound, frequency, and pitch in stop-motion doodles.
The origins of most mathematical symbols are either lost in the mists of antiquity, or are so recent that there is no doubt where they came from. The equals sign is unusual because it dates back more than 450 years, yet we not only know who invented it, we even know why. The inventor was Robert Recorde, in 1557, in The Whetstone of Witte. He used two parallel lines (he used an obsolete word gemowe, meaning ‘twin’) to avoid tedious repetition of the words ‘is equal to’. He chose that symbol because ‘no two things can be more equal’. Recorde chose well. His symbol has remained in use for 450 years.
How the equals sign originated, and the story of 17 equations that changed the world.
A good many times I have been presented at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: ‘Have you ever read a work of Shakespeare’s?’
C.P. Snow’s legendary 1959 lament, cited by mathematician Ian Stewart, who argues that understanding the 17 equations that changed the world is form of basic modern literacy.
A visual sieve for prime numbers by Carlos Paris. More on the fascinating process of how it was one here.
Minds of Modern Mathematics – wonderful free iPad app on the history of math from IBM Research, inspired by IBM’s seminal exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair, Mathematica: A World of Numbers…and Beyond.
Also see Errol Morris’s short film about the IBM math and engineering pioneers of the same era, who “caught the way the world works,” with original music by Philip Glass.
