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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 rather hope it doesn't serve as museum from a time when the US was interested in and invested in math and science.
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.
MMM is Marine,Marauder,Medivac. It will be too confusing. 3M is much better.
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
3M is Post-It notes.
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.
I sure hope that they do provide some interesting insights when it comes to how Fermat's theorem was solved
The last PBS "NOVA" show I ever watched was theoretically about that very topic. Unfortunately, it was 60 minutes about how messy his desk is, yet its such a nice house and yard, and he has a wife and kids, and he certainly is brave to try something difficult instead of sitting at home and watching Oprah reruns, and he has pet cats, and similar such daytime talk show garbage. I was literally sitting at the edge of my couch drinking an energy drink waiting for some "math" explanation of the FLT proof using computer graphics, maybe by The Man Himself, and then I get .... Roll the Credits! .. and later tonight, on Lawrence Welk ... !
I fear, greatly, that this will be a museum about mathematicians not about math. Look, we have one of Newton's hair curlers! Over here, a life size diorama of Erdos. A statue of Pythagoras over here! A poster of the village Srinivasa Ramanujan grew up in! We are Smart because we spray painted a large Square Root sign on the Wall!
And then, sadly, on the walkway to the exit, a stream of bubbas telling each other how much they learned about math today. How horribly sad, and I hope none of my predictions come true, although I expect them to.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Is there anything that could potentially be solved by someone who enjoys dabbling in a bit of math, or do you need an advanced degree just to understand the problem?
The most obvious /. car analogy is any amateur can build a completely customized car, even a race car, given enough time and effort, even if the major car companies would be completely uninterested and are staffed exclusively with professionals who have advanced degrees.
I would think an amateur could be successful if focused on an extremely narrow little area for some years, perhaps cryptographic hashes, some peculiar tiny aspect of number theory, maybe a sticky computer science Knuth style analysis problem, strange geometry/topology problems...
The hard part with math (especially CS and especially CS crypto) is learning what not to do. Also crypto is an area where the greatest advances are made by destroying other peoples algorithms, not by building your own.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger