The Reuleaux Car The pieces are below, and an AI, SVG, and Corel File are available here. The file has a laser etch on the big wheel to guide the placement of the smaller piece. Glue two small pieces to one side and two large ones on the other side. The wheel holders work by sliding so you can install
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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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The idea for MathHappens to work with tessellating pentagons originated from intern Jason Gorst’s suggestions for future projects on his final report. A tessellation describes an arrangement of shapes that tiles a plane with no gaps or overlaps.The challenge of finding all possible tessellating pentagons was issued in 1900 by David Hilbert at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris
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We are very excited to have our first batch of all 15 Pentagons! Thanks to Parker Dewey intern Jason Gorst for having this idea back in January. We have since celebrated Marjorie Rice and her contribution to the pentagon project, and it inspired a whole series on tessellation that we have brought to schools, the library, the Thinkery, the Nature
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This summer the fractal fun just won’t stop! We met Mychal Threets, the Children’s Librarian at the Solano County Library’s Springstowne Branch, when he visited our booth at the Bay Area Makersfaire. Mychal sometimes uses coloring sheets as a fun way to extend the time families spend in the library after his popular StoryTime. He told us he wanted to give
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Josephine Sheng, Paola Garcia and Cassandra Gonzalez at Science Day Tessellation puzzles are a great way to spend some time with some regular and irregular polygons and as a group make some beautiful puzzles. These are going to stay at Gilbert Elementary in the library. And we got a nice note from the principal: Thank you so much for sending
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We were invited to bring some Math to Killeen Texas on Saturday March 9th and we brought a lot! See the Program guide Michelle made. You can also follow links in the guide to some quickie videos that explain the math activities and models we took with us to Killeen. MathHappens staff for this event included Quan Vuong, Alex Li,
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We had a wonderful, productive Fall 2018 here at MathHappens and we celebrated the end in style! We went to Whole Foods to eat and ice skate! Present were Michelle, Ben, Paola, Josephine, Halle, Rusheel, Abdulkarim, and Lauren. Some big achievements from this fall were: Participating in Austin Museum Day with activities at FIVE different museum locations Going to the
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We had a great time at Maker Pfest this past Saturday! The Pflugerville Public Library is a beautiful community space and we were pleased to see so many excited visitors at Maker Pfest. Abdulkarim and Arami, both part of the UTeach Maker program, staffed the event. Abdulkarim talked to visitors about the golden ratio calipers and how this ratio shows
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We brought a variety of materials and most importantly three of our UTeach Spring Interns to Educator night sponsored by the Austin Museum Partnership, and hosted at the LBJ Library — Fancy. We had some great conversations with teachers and with museum staff about adding math to museum offerings and about opportunities to take Math Field Trips!