Math goggles: making “What if?..” collages

Math Goggles help you notice math everywhere. What if we had a planet for our moon? What if we had tiny hands at our fingertips?

Photo sources: the skies; the hands; eye/mouth; the duck.

Asking “What if?..” about everything is one of the main ways people create mathematics.

• What if you kept counting backwards past zero? 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0… And now we have negative numbers!
• What if numbers became negative when squared? And now we have imaginary numbers!
• What if parallel lines intersected? And now we have geometry on the globe!

Oh wait, that’s just our Earth. It’s not an abstraction, created by mathematicians. As far as we know.

What if we replaced some familiar things with other familiar things, while keeping the right ratios between sizes? Maybe we would notice the ratios more. Or maybe we would just get scared. Invite your children to make their own collages. It makes for a funky math art project.