Appreciation

Appreciation Art Teaching Technology

Math and Art: Curvefitting With Geogebra

Here is some student work from a recent project I conducted on fitting curves to images in Geogebra. The details of the assignment can be found here, and more examples of student work can be seen on my Facebook page.

Students were asked to find pictures and use Geogebra to fit trigonometric curves to the images using transformations. Here are some of the results.

Smart Water = Smart Curves

My Good-Looking Windowsill

Sine of Camel Humps

Overall, I was really impressed with the creativity the students showed, and their facility with fitting these curves to the forms! A mathematical and artistic success in my book.

Appreciation Geometry Photography

Math and Art: Shadows and Triangles

The sun sometimes turns rectangles into triangles. A nice Sunday morning image.

By patrick honner, 13 years6 years ago

Appreciation Art Representation

Math and Art: Dancing Bubble Sort

This is a fun and whimsical demonstration of bubble sorting through dance!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyZQPjUT5B4

The dancers arrange themselves in numerical order in the same manner one would bubble sort an unordered list. One by one, each number “compares” himself with the number on his left; if they are out of order, they switch places. Make you’re way down the list, and start again at the front. Repeat until no one switches places and voila! everyone’s in order!

And just to be thorough, the troupe does dance-representations of Insert-Sort, Shell-Sort, and Select-Sort algorithms as well!

By patrick honner, 13 years6 years ago

Appreciation Art Challenge

Math and Art: Custom Pi Necklace

My contribution to Pi Day Celebrations: a student-made necklace that encodes the first 80 or so digits of pi in beads!

Starting with the pendant as 3, the student carefully strung the beads in a circle (clockwise) according to the following mapping:

Thus, you can read off 3.14159265358, and so on. A truly thoughtful, creative, and inspired work! I think the student’s original inspiration might have been this other pi-themed necklace.

Appreciation Art History

Math and Art: Logicomix, a Mathematical Graphical Novel

This is an innovative and intriguing idea: a graphic novel based on the infamous struggles to articulate the foundations of mathematics.

http://www.logicomix.com/

The story is apparently narrated by the great mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, and the cast of characters includes Georg Cantor, Kurt Godel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and many other prominent figures from mathematics and logic. A review in the New York Times can be found here.

The philosophy of mathematics is extremely interesting (start by asking yourself “What is a number?”), and this particular tale is truly a fascinating one. I am eager to see how these graphic artists tell the story.

By patrick honner, 13 years6 years ago

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