Laurie Spugnardi

Archive for the ‘observations’ Category

Boston Museum of Science: Mathematica

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

One of the delightful parts of parenting is that you get to go on adventures you may not otherwise have the opportunity to experience. We go to the Museum of Science every couple of years with our kids and it is a different experience each time. Not just because some of the exhibits change, but because the kids change. They absorb the same information in an entirely different way at each stage of their cognitive development. Me too.

My favorite exhibit is Mathematica. It was designed by Charles and Ray Eames (of chair fame) and manages to make math, kind of, well… fun. Have you ever tried to wrap your head around how a Mobius Band works? Trippy.

The exhibit is loaded with interactive fun, while showing how math is the basis for art, architecture, music and design. We humans respond to order in our art. As it turns out, beauty has a mathematical formula.
It reads like this:
images
and it looks like this:
Spiral

Snapshots from the museum…
sm_graphicsmath Mathematical relationships and their graphic counterparts: Organized doodles!

sm_pyth
The Pythagorean Theorem, the Fibonacci Series and the Golden Ratio: Perfection in Proportion.

sm_networks sm_graphic
(left) Network mathematics: Think… the internet or the lymphatic system.
(right) A family of curves satisfying a differential equation. I don’t even know what that means, but it’s much more interesting than my last family portrait.