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Mathematics Museum To Open In Manhattan
eldavojohn writes "If math gives you a raging brainer prepare yourself for MoMath opening next year to 'expose the breadth and the beauty of mathematics' in New York City. After raising $22 million from donors, Glen Whitney wants to challenge the average American's perception of mathematics. Whitney has proven himself with Math Midway a sort of traveling carnival exhibit, and prior to that worked on algorithms at Renaissance Technologies."
Visitors must pay $3.14 to enter.
I sure hope that they do provide some interesting insights when it comes to how Fermat's theorem was solved and a lot of stuff that can range from weird to simple but interesting.
And there are a lot of math out there that's still waiting to get solved. Some of it may even have an impact on our daily life.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Hope they call it 3M instead of MMM (Manhattan Mathematics Museum).
Thus demonstrating the principle of the limit of information value as the intelligence of the poster goes to zero.
They'll do something they think is clever like announcing their opening date as "If a train is heading to Manhattan from Los Angeles to open a museum on mathematics at 50 mph, and leaves on the first friday in July 2011, and another train is heading to Manhattan for the same reason at 150 mph but departs on the following monday, which train arrives on opening day first.. and what date is it?" hurr durrr.
I hope they show some np 'unsolvable' problems. they translate nicely into easy to understand story problems and show that we still have alot to learn even about math.
You need a combination of both, though I believe that pure abstract would be superior to pure application. Teaching pure application leads to rote memorization. "This is how you solve this specific problem. This is how you solve this one." and so on and so forth. It leads to people who know precisely what they're told and nothing more, and when they encounter a problem that isn't within that scope, they dismiss it with any of a number of foolish reasons. By teaching abstract, you equip people to take what they know about one thing and apply it to something else. That said, abstract without application leaves many people (foolishly) assuming that there is no application. Focus on the abstract, make sure people understand it. Then show them how to apply that abstract to an application themselves. Hopefully then we can avoid the constant, insipid questions that have answers that should be obvious with just a single layer of abstraction from the previous concept. If not...well, the world still needs janitors and garbage men...
I must be getting old. I haven't had a raging brainer in years, unless you count that 'morning logarithm' a couple of weeks back...
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Mathematica, from 1961. It's at the New York Hall of Science now.
I had the pleasure of meeting George Hart at a recent Maker Faire. George is one of the people working on getting this museum up and running. Go Google some of his art / math. It's fantastic, beautiful and fun. Also Google his daughter Vi Hart. She has a great blog and some fun YouTube videos. She's the one wearing forearm warmers at any math related gathering (don't ask).
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
I hope 123 4th Street is available.
For me, the drudgery suddenly became a lot more interesting after learning about the Mandelbrot set and its relationship to Julia sets. Their infinity and the beautiful patterns which derive from it made it more interesting to find points within a Julia set by setting up a quadratic. Hopefully, this museum will be able to convey the beauty of mathematics, which can often be the missing ingredient in classrooms, since understanding the beauty requires the knowledge of getting through drudgery.
Statistics is in a way, a great place to start. Most of it doesn't require any major mathematical skills to comprehend, and people would certainly get a kick out of some of those manipulations, or at least examples of them.
Couple this with some stories/examples of "cool stuff you can do with math", like some simple cryptography, and I think you'll be able to reach out to some people who'd otherwise (like me, before the whole Mandelbrot set thing) continue pretty much ignoring mathematics as anything more than an obligatory school subject.
Showing applications to the real world may make someone see how math is useful. However it goes counter to what Math itself is. Math is about being able to engage in and appreciate a symbolic and logical way of communicating and reasoning. Applying that to the real world has two steps: make a model to embed your real world situation into math and then derive facts from your model mathematically. The problem is that the model making isn't itself math at all, and doing math on a model will rarely show the beauty of math. That is because those models are made to fit reality and not to be mathematically interesting. Applied math and math might seem similar if you don't understand math, but they are actually very far apart.
It's like the difference between having sight and using a mirror to generate solar power. Having sight makes understanding and making mirrors a lot easier, but sight is so much richer than that. Problem is that it is very hard to explain to someone who is blind what it feels like to see. When you see abstract math you are like a blind person listening to an explanation of sight when all you really care about are mirrors. The explanation will seem weirdly obtuse and off the point, but that's because the person talking isn't talking about mirrors, he's talking about seeing.
Now it might be right that teaching someone to "get" abstract math in the course of a museum visit is a fool's errand. Still, I wish this guy luck in that goal if indeed that is his goal. However, I think the article writer simply views all math as abstract and what the museum will actually be about will be the people involved in math, it's applications and so on. Just like you wanted.
very cool idea
They're missing a number. Proof is left as an exercise for the visitor.
Those bast8rds kicked me out for dividing by zero!
Table-ized A.I.
this is true. I had no love for math until I took computer sciences in high school and suddenly I had a practical use for it. To this day I suffer from bad teaching of math, and I had to catch up to speed on my own.
but www.3m.museum is free