June | 2012 | Math Munch

Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

Triangle Cutout Fractal

Up first, check out the Fractal Foundation. They’re mission is simple: “We use the beauty of fractals to inspire interest in Science, Math and Art.” If you played around with recursive drawing a few weeks ago, then perhaps you were as inspired by fractals as they hope you’ll be. If you’re not really sure what fractals actually are, here’s a great one-page explanation from the Fractal Foundation website. They also have an excellent page of “fractivities,” including instructions for the beautiful paper cutout fractal pictured on the right. If you want to have your mind blow, check out their fantastic page of fractal videos. Just amazing.

Next up, have you ever heard of Schoolhouse Rock? It’s a series of rocking animated music videos that originally ran on TV from 1973 to 1985. Vintage math goodness! They cover all kinds of educational stuff like grammar and history, but I totally love the math videos, and a few of them are on YouTube! Down below you can watch two of my favorites, and you can find the others here. if you poke around YouTube, you could probably find a few more as well.

Finally, a few additions to our resource pages. For the Math Games page, we’re adding Linebounder. You and the computer battle to draw a line towards your goal. I had a really hard time with this at first, but there are certain strategies that the computer simply cannot beat. You just have to find them. Also new is Shift, another fun game that plays with the relationship between figure and ground. For the new Math Art Tools page, we’re adding Tessellate! It’s an interactive applet that lets you make custom tiles to cover the plane. Here’s a few examples I just made.

Bon appetit!