Yesterday I took a trip to New York, in part to visit the Museum of Mathematics, commonly called MoMATH, because I myself have been fascinated throughout my life with mathematics and its applications in our lives. It turns out, so are lots of people, many of them children, and they could be seen playing on the various exhibits at the museum, which opened in December.
It’s the only museum in North America dedicated only to mathematics, but that alone doesn’t impress me. A fascination with mathematics itself is probably less universal than I would have thought, given my own interests. What impressed me here was the way kids could immerse themselves in mathematics like they would immerse themselves in a coal mine at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry or in shark-infested waters at Baltimore’s National Aquarium.
For example, the first exhibit you see as you enter is called “Hyper Hyperboloid.” Kids are invited to sit in a chair and spin around. The spinning rotates a circle above them and a circle below so colorful, stretchable strings attached to the two circles are rotated around. The key here is that the strings stay straight but the 3D shape, known as a hyperboloid, converges above the kid sitting in the chair, making sort of a narrow midsection while the circles at the top and bottom remain the same size. This completely immerses the kid on the chair in a 3D shape that he controls himself by spinning.
The “Harmony of the Spheres” exhibit, located on Floor –1 (1 below the ground)
I was not very impressed with the touchscreens that are set up by each exhibit to offer an explanation about the underlying mathematics. In many exhibits, you can read “Basic” or “More math” explanations. For the hyperboloid exhibit, under “Basic,” the screen invited kids to think of the lines making the hyperboloid as “graphs of second degree equations in three variables, typically x, y, z.” Not quite “basic” there.
One touchscreen, the one by the “Harmony of the Spheres” exhibit, didn’t even work while I was there, despite repeated attempts by staff members to reboot the device by smartphone. It wasn’t worth much anyway, since the initial screen invited the players to try three spheres that formed a triangle. Grab one of the spheres, and hear a three-note chord, known in music as a triad. Grab a connecting sphere, and one of the notes changed, making a different-sounding chord. Then, grab the third one, and finally return to the first sphere. Then, the chord had been modified by what came in between, but staff members by the exhibit were unable to explain to me the mathematics underlying the changing of the notes.
Or, consider an exquisitely mathematical two-story, paraboloid-shaped exhibit on a spiral staircase set up as a multiplication calculator. It has 10 parallel rings, numbered 1 through 10, stacked up. A colored string connecting a ring with itself was said to show the perfect square of that number because the string crossed a number line from 1 to 100 going up through the middle of the exhibit at the square of that ring’s number. Kids could press two numbers on a control panel, and that would cause the string between those two rings and the product of those two numbers on the number line, where the string crossed, to light up. For example, pressing 6 and 4 on the panel would light up the 24 on the number line and the string that connected the sixth ring and the fourth ring.
The explanation on the touchscreen for this exhibit made reference to the shape of the overall exhibit, saying that it had something to do with the idea of perfect squares. But the connection was not explained well at all. There is a fascinating explanation as to why this exhibit takes on the shape that it does, but leaving that off and staffing the place with people who really can’t explain it to visitors—kids and adults alike—definitely shows room for improvement.
The “Square-Wheeled Trike” exhibit
One of the most popular exhibits is a set of two tricycles that have square wheels. On flat ground, these would produce a rather bumpy ride, but if the track for the trikes is shaped in a repeating catenary pattern, the ride is smooth, just as if the trikes had round wheels and kids were riding on flat ground. So again, the strength of the exhibit is that kids can be immersed in a world of mathematics: kids learn by doing, and at MoMATH, they do things. But again, the weakness is the explanation on the touchscreen, which refers to a catenary as the shape of a naturally hanging chain or the Gateway Arch in St Louis but offers little information about why the ride kids experience is so smooth.
Other exhibits include a live fractal generator, which uses cameras and dancing kids to project images with fractal trees growing out of each arm; a game two people can play to see who can come up with three numbers that add up to 15 first—or “block” their opponent from playing the three numbers—which involves the idea of magic squares; and the “Tessellation Station,” which allows kids to put together pieces in an infinite repeating pattern of interconnected shapes.
There are several other exhibits as well, some of which aren’t quite ready for public display yet. The museum is young, and I hope some of these problems can be worked out in the near future. The museum is the perfect “proof” of the educational theory that kids learn by doing, and mathematics is one subject that many American students find abstract, which makes learning it difficult, especially at young ages.
The Museum is located at 11 E 26th Street in Manhattan and is open from 10 AM to 5 PM, seven days a week, 364 days a year (closed on Thanksgiving Day). MoMath closes at 2:30 on the first Wednesday of every month. Admission is $16 for adults; children ≤ 12, students, and senior citizens are $10. Online_prices = regular_prices – $1.
