We love having conversations about math and these were all about Texas history too! The Texas History Center’s 8th annual Real Places Conference attracts museums of all kinds. It was a great opportunity to share and showcase some of our land survey artifacts including a real Vara Chain, a 1/2 Gunter Chain, a document written by Robert Creuzbauer that explains
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The T-Puzzle is a very old puzzle and it comes in several versions. In the version we made, the width and height are the same. Jordan Varat cut a board with silhouettes as puzzles that we will send to our math rooms in Austin, Mankato and Albuquerque. Megan Do worked on the CAD files and created the printable silhouettes
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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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Exciting Update: Ella Basken made a mini version that you can 3d print! You can find the directions and links to the files for the base and the top in this document. We had a make party all through MathFest hosted by Ella Basken (not shown) and Matt Hertel from MathHappens in Austin. Dan van der Vieren who uses
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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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