MAKE » Tag: mathmonday

Penny Sierpinski Triangle

Glen Whitney — Mon, 13 May 2013 19:00:45 +0000

Here's a project we did a long time ago in collaboration with Vi Hart, that somehow never made it into Math Mondays. The idea is simple: lay out pennies on a large horizontal surface, such as a floor, in the pattern of a Sierpinski triangle. How many? Well, the basic triangle with a one-penny size hole

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Things from Rings

Glen Whitney — Mon, 06 May 2013 19:00:19 +0000

From the Museum of Mathematics The Math Mondays Experimental Making Labs recently received numerous binder rings in its Incoming Raw Materials box. You know — the little circles that clip closed, used to hold a sheaf of hole-punched paper together. According to the donor: “Here’s an office supply item that […]

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DIY Tensegrity

Glen Whitney — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:00:50 +0000

In honor of a recent visit to Kenneth Snelson's workshop, and as a continued tribute to Math Craft, which has a nice gallery of tensegrity projects, here's a detailed, step-by-step illustration of how to make a tensegrity structure that you may not find in a lot of other places -- a frustum of a pentagonal pyramid.

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Tribute to Math Craft

Glen Whitney — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 19:06:15 +0000

It's good to know there's room in the world for two blogs devoted to the myriad of really cool things that you can make using or illustrating the wonders of mathematics. Everyone who reads and likes Math Mondays should know about the occasional series Math Craft. I thought I'd devote today's column to highlighting three relatively recent great projects detailed on Math Craft.

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Math Monday: Light Still Sticks

Glen Whitney — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 20:37:01 +0000

The Museum of Mathematics' Glen Whitney shows you how to build an octahedron and more with light sticks, rubber bands, and paper fasteners.

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Math Monday: Sonobe Some More

Glen Whitney — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 20:59:03 +0000

For the Museum of Mathematics Last column, we saw some of the basics of modular origami with the Sonobe unit. Today’s post is mostly a gallery of a few of the limitless cool things you can do with this unit. But first, a note about chirality. A three-dimensional object is […]

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Math Monday: Introducing the Sonobe Unit

Glen Whitney — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 19:12:47 +0000

There have been numerous installments of Math Monday on origami or kirigami of one mathematical form or another, but today is the first time we've covered a classic workhorse from this genre: the Sonobe modular origami unit. One of the simplest and most versatile of the modular units, there's so much to say about Sonobe that today we're going to start from the basics (parallelogram one?) and next time we'll take it to places I hope you've never seen it go before.

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Math Monday: Platonic Party Platter

Glen Whitney — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 19:54:13 +0000

Looking for just the right snack at your next "We Love Geometry!" or "Athenian Appreciation Day" party? How about a regular tetrahedron of cheese?

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Geometry Takes Flight

Glen Whitney — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 06:23:10 +0000

Math Mondays is back from spring break with some mathematical ideas that are perfect for March's winds: you can make a kite with any number of pure geometric forms. First off, the very word "kite" has its own specific mathematical meaning: any quadrilateral with two pairs of equal adjacent edges.

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Math Monday: Business Cards III

Glen Whitney — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 20:05:06 +0000

I wanted to follow up on the two prior installments on the making opportunities presented by business cards with a roundup of some of the more exotic things that one can do with them. Beyond this, if you think I've missed some particularly mathematically worthy or impressive business card constructions, please send me your suggestions at mondays@momath.org

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