Math Goggles: 3D printer adventures with Moebius strips
Math Goggles help you notice math everywhere.
The Moebius strip is the metaphor for everything endless or cyclic. Like what? Check out these composite symbols!
infinity + luck = ?
cycle + chase = ?
endless + love = ?
Moebius strip can mean endless bacon, to end world hunger!
Moebius strip can stand for Pi being irrational.
“Mobius Ganesha is named for Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu deity who is the remover of obstacles. It is also a single sided surface. Like a complex Mobius strip, the inside and outside are one. This represents non-dualism as well as the intellectual integration of radically opposing concepts into singular understanding.”
Meta-Moebius is made of 36 interlocking Moebius strips, to represent infinity infinities. Or maybe to represent 36 infinities.
Jokes about infinity and alcohol just write themselves when you look at the elegant Moebius Sake* Cup. In unrelated news, Moebius cups are chiral; here’s a left-handed version.
(*)Also works with vodka.
Pac-Moebius and the never-ending chase.
Ensure infinite luck with one-sided die. You are guaranteed to roll any number you want, as long as it’s 1.
The never-ending loop of Crash Tests? Joyfully macabre! We are told these happy test dummies are named Vince and Larry. Imagine the attack of the test dummy clones. Vince 1, Larry 1, Vince 2, Larry 2…
Moebius + a symbols of love = INFINITE LOVE. Here are two well-known symbols of love: matching rings, and a heart.
Posted in Grow
Math goggles: Moebius jewelry and 19th-century animation machines
Math Goggles help you notice math everywhere. Thank you, Katrina Mills and STEMcrafted (J.E. Johnson) – you notice beautiful math on Pinterest!
If your kids don’t work with gold and silver as the sculptor Ilana Krepchin, you can still make Moebius strip jewelry out of fabric, polymer clay, or thick paper. Cover the strip with paint or polish to make it sturdy and pretty. Glue on a marble. It invokes the amazing property of the Moebius strip’s topology: your marble could roll around and around the single side!
Calculus is like animation: it captures infinitesimal instances of change and movement as snapshots! Invite your kids to animate like it’s 1830s. It takes just a few minutes to make a flipbook, a zoetrope, or a phenakistoscope. The hardest to pronounce is the easiest to make.
Posted in Grow
Math goggles: cymatics and minimalist posters
Math Goggles help you notice math everywhere. Via Simon Gregg and Becka Rucker, who notice math on Pinterest.
Can you see sounds? Over a vibrating surface, sand or powder arranges itself into a symmetrical pattern, like a snowflake. You can use these cymatics effects to make fine art.
Try it at home with a DIY sound plate – or with a bit of sand on top of your subwoofer.
The genre of minimalist poster is accessible and popular, so you can easily make your own. Here are some beautiful examples from Emma Megan Moore.
Posted in Grow
Snowflakes, Part II: 3D origami, fractals in the Alps, artistic apps
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Welcome to adventurous math for the playground crowd! I am Moby Snoodles, and I love to hear from you at moby@moebiusnoodles.com
Special snowflakes, take 2!
Happy holidays! Last December, we wrote about snowflake-related math in our December newsletter. “Special Snowflake” is one of the most popular activities in the Moebius Noodles book (see below) and our workshops, so we are doing a snowflake newsletter again!
Snowflakes as fractals
What do snowflakes, trees, corals, and your lungs have in common? They consist of branching structures! These types of structures are called tree fractals. Check out instructions on how to make a hexagon-based fractal snowflakes designed by MathRecreation. You can make some snowflake tree fractals – or maybe tree tree fractals – as holiday decorations.
3D origami snowflakes
Most people know how to cut snowflakes out of paper. The Japanese term for paper craft with scissors is kirigami. But you can also make snowflakes in the tradition of origami, that is, folding without cutting. Just follow video instructions from Origami Maniacs. Origami is an art, but also a type of geometry, with its own set of axioms more powerful than Euclid’s. And as far as young kids are concerned, paper folding develops attention, precision, and appreciation of beauty: the values necessary for doing mathematics.
Giant snowflakes in the Alps… or at the beach
Check out giant snowflake art pieces covering whole mountain slopes. Even if you are not joining Simon Beck’s math adventures in the French Alps, you can make smaller symmetrical designs at the park or in your yard.
Snow is not an option? Make snowflake art at the sandy beach or in a sandbox!
Snowflake lapware
Lapware is the software for the kid cuddling in your lap. Here are my picks that show both beauty and symmetry of snowflakes.
Weave Silk feels great on touch screens (Android, iOS), but you can also play it on PC. The interface is easy enough for toddlers, and includes terms like 6-fold symmetry for parents.
Make sure to click both 2D and 3D rotate buttons after designing a snowflake with zefrank’s browser applet. The transformations are mesmerizing!
SymmetriSketch software for Mac, Windows or Linux comes from EvilMadScientist.com – with the name like that, it must be awesome!
Sharing
You are welcome to share, remix and tweak. Please credit MoebiusNoodles.com under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license: CC BY-NC-SA.
Happy Holidays!
Moby Snoodles, aka Dr. Maria Droujkova
Posted in Newsletter
