Month: November 2019

BAMM @ Your School

BAMM @ Your School is one of the outreach projects at the Department of Mathematics. Through this program, we take fun, engaging, and deep mathematics workshops to schools in the Columbus Metropolitan area.

Notebook showing 4 by 4 and 5 by 5 configurations with their Mondrian numbersJust on November 21st, we had the opportunity to visit a fourth grade group at Daniel Wright Elementary School. Erika Roldan led a workshop on Mondrian numbers. Students worked in pairs and received an envelope containing red, yellow, blue, and white rectangles of all possible integer dimensions between 1 and 5. “Today you are going to become painters with these pieces”, said Erika.

Their first task was to classify the pieces according to their shape, in other words they had to make groups of congruent rectangles. Then they were asked to find all possible ways of building a 3 by 3 square using non-congruent pieces. When finished, they went on to do the same for a 4 by 4 and a 5 by 5 square.

Their last task was to compute the Mondrian number for all the possible configurations they had found. The Mondrian number of one of these such configurations is the difference between the maximum and the minimum areas of its pieces. To be able to do these, students registered their configurations on their notebooks. Some students made a lot of progress in the task, but even those who weren’t as fast practiced their geometrical skills and had a fun math class.

BAMM @ Your School is free and its only subject to time availability. Volunteers are very much welcomed and appreciated. Contact us, if you would like to visit a school with us.

The Mathematics of Origami

Last week, the Department of Mathematics, through the outreach initiative, had a guest for the Recreational Mathematics Seminar. Laura Jimenez is a mathematician and a PhD candidate at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Kansas. In college, she began to develop a passion for origami, and she was able to tie it with mathematics. When she was a master’s student, she worked in mathematical outreach and popularization and gave workshops about the mathematics behind origami.

At the Recreational Mathematics Seminar on Friday, November 15, Laura talked about how not only math is used in proving whether something is foldable or not and finding the folding pattern, but also origami can be a powerful tool for solving mathematical problems, such as solving a third-degree equation.

During the talk, the speaker presented the Huzita axioms, the mathematical principles of paper folding. The axioms lisSecond Huzita axiom shown in paper folding.t the seven operations that can be achieved by folding paper. The first axiom reads “Given two distinct points p1 and p2, there is a unique fold that passes through both of them.” The second one goes about placing a point into another; in this case the fold created turns out to be the perpendicular bisector to the segment joining the two points. Later on, Laura showed how one can trisect an acute angle by folding paper, in other words, by following the Huzita axioms.

The seminar was followed by a workshop where attendants learned how to fold a cube and a 12-pointed star of modular origami. Some would say that this type of origami is the most mathematical one. Modular origami pieces are made up by several sheets of paper. Each sheet is folded in the same manner, creating a unit with flaps and pockets. Then all pieces are put together by inserting flaps into pockets. This type of origami allows us to build geometrical objects such as the platonic solids.

Laura emphasized hUndergraduate student showing the 12-pointed star he folded.ow origami is a great tool for teaching geometry.

On Saturday, our guest also ran our Girls Exploring Math Monthly workshop. Students explored the properties of buckyballs, polyhedra with regular pentagons and hexagons as faces. They analyzed the number of vertices, edges, and faces of each type, and came up with a relation between them. When building the origami model of a dodecahedron, the girls also looked at its graph representation and found a Hamiltonian path on it. Then, they used it to decide how to assemble the origami modules so that all the edges connected in every vertex had different colors (using modules of three different colors – it’s not as easy as you might think!).Young girls working at the Girls Exploring Math origami workshop.

The Recreational Math Seminar is gaining presence within the Department’s community, showing the most entertaining side of math. Recreational Math is a great way of getting undergraduate students interested in research. We will continue to bring more guests next term.

Inspiring Women of Color to Do Math

AWOW, Advocates for Women of the World, is a student organization at Ohio State that advocates for international women’s rights. One of their goals is to promote access to education for everyone. As such, on November 16 they held an event in which around 30 young girls visited the Columbus Campus. For this, they partnered up with Proyecto MarProyecto Mariposas girls and AWOW members posing in the Department's lobbyiposas, a non-profit Columbus based organization that provides an environment of learning, sharing, and support to Latina girls and their mothers.

During the event, AWOW members led the girls on a tour around campus. The visitors also met with Office of Diversity and Inclusion Assistant Vice Provost, Yolanda Zepeda, to talk about the Latinx experience on a college campus.

Buckeye Aha! Math Moments was happy to join their efforts by welcoming the girls in the Mathematics Tower. During their short visit to our Department, they listened to Assistant Professor Liz Vivas‘ experience. Originally from Peru, Liz is a living example of how women of color can succeed in college and in mathematics. Girls also peaked into a Girls Exploring Math Monthly workshop that was being held that same day and were invited to join for those workshops as well as BAMM’s other activities.

The Department of Mathematics is a big one, and it welcomes all people regardless of race and gender. However, certain groups, such as women of color, are still underrepresented. With small actions like this one, BAMM hopes to contribute to create a more diverse environment.

Building Real Mathematical Surfaces

This week, Buckeye Aha! Math Moments had a series of events around the work of a special guest. Maria Garcia Monera, from the University of Valencia (Spain), is interested in Topology and Geometry and in designing and building paper models of surfaces.Graduate student assembling a paper model of an ellipsoid.

Even from last week we started preparing for Maria’s visit. We built some of her models and displayed them in the Mathematics Tower lobby for everybody to see. Then on Monday, Maria gave the Recreational Mathematics Seminar. She explained that he technique she uses is based on the work of Felix Klein, Alexander Von Brill, and John Sharp. In an era before computers, where one could render the surfaces on a screen, the motivation for creating these models was aiding students in the visualization of the mathematical objects. The idea behind is finding plane curves contained on surfaces that can be cut in paper and used to reproduce the model.

The seminar was well attended by postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students, and lecturers, becoming the most popular Recreational Mathematics Seminar so far.

On Tuesday, Maria gave a workshop at the Columbus Public Library (Northside Branch) were some children built an orange paper sphere and decorated it as a pumpkin. Then on Wednesday, during Teas, those who attended the seminar (and a few others) put in practice what they had learned, building paper surfaces such as paraboloids, water drops, ellipsoids, andMetro School class crafting some surface paper models hearts.

Finally, on Thursday Maria worked with a 6th and 7th grade math class at Metro Middle School. She talked about surfaces of revolution and then the children worked in teams to craft spherical pumpkins and hearts.

Recreational Mathematics is about fun and entertainment, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t serious mathematics involved. As the Mathematical Association of America writes “Recreational mathematics is inspired by deep ideas that are hidden in puzzles, games, and other forms of play”. With Maria’s visit, the Department’s community had fun and obtained a tool for helping students visualize surfaces. Hopefully, some were so inspired that they will design their own paper model.