April 1st, 2023 We staffed a booth at Maker Faire Los Angeles. We brought some of our favorite models, activities and giveaways and we were also able to bring the brand new Hat Tile or Mono Tile newly discovered by an amateur mathematician. Intern Ella Basken made the trip and did an outstanding job representing with the team. Read Ella’s
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The Tusi couple is a mathematical device in which a small circle rotates inside a larger circle twice the diameter of the smaller circle. With this relationship of diameters, each point on the circumference of the smaller circle actually follows a linear path as the rotation occurs. Here’s a link to a video so you can see it in motion. Files to
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SE Branch library invited us to participate in their event celebrating music from Kenya. We found a new strategy game two player strategy game called Shisima that is related to tic-tac-toe, that originates from Kenya. Melissa Wilkinson cut and made the design that Stefany Espinoza created. Quan Nguyen and Marianne Villanueva brought the game to SE Branch, participated in some drumming and
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Dan van der Vieren who uses our Parabola stretchers with his college Algebra classes wondered if we could design a frame to make a hyperbola like this one. As it happens, we had a couple of ideas. The best result was this gear design. You can string the frame with elastic cord with the plate in the top position and
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We found an instructable on making chalk art patterns in CorelDraw. But guess what? — you can use this technique to poster print all kinds of fun 3d designs. The instructable is here. Its pretty cool! We sent a logo perspective box, aReuleux car and some conic section models to the NWMath Conference. PDFs can be printed in various sizes. “Chalk”
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Here’s a link to an interview I did this morning with CBS Austin’s Trevor Scott. MathHappens Foundation is an active participant in the Austin museum community. We have learned a lot in eight years of collaborations about the way museums approach storytelling, sharing knowledge and ideas with an intent to spark interest and start conversations.
I learned about these on a video on Numberphile. . In the video they said the magic words “no longer available” and that was it, we had to make our own. Josephine Sheng designed these way back in 2017 I think, and we just never posted. We don’t like “tricking” people, but if you have a good half hour you can
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Turns out you can use CorelDraw to reverse engineer the parts to a conic section model. Read all about it in the November 2021 MAA Math Horizons page called Do The Math (p. 29). Editor Tom Edgar was fun to work with, and made the graphic images. Note: if you are “making” this model from scratch, once you find the
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Why does this project NEVER turn out? It happens that we have been missing a critical fact. The arm of the linkage is NOT the same length as the radius (k) of the larger reference circle used for the inversion even though we wanted it to be. The workshop is littered with failed tries. The arm length and the sides
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Napier’s Bones are a manually operated calculator created by John Napier in 1612. This calculator is based on Lattice Multiplication and helps math learners with multiplying large numbers by a single digit number. Math learners! Start identifying multiplication patterns by making your own set of Napier’s Bones! Materials: Napier’s Bones Paper Template: https://tinyurl.com/rh5xdajt Writing utensil (pencil or pen) Popsicle sticks
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