Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

After a few weeks off, we’re back with some exciting things to share.  First up is Futility Closet, a blog featuring “an idler’s miscellany of compendious amusements.”  The blog is full of big-worded phrases like that, but I most love the puzzles they often post – everything from chess to numbers, codes, and devilish word play.  I also love that the name of the person who wrote each puzzle accompanies it.  Take a look at the few I’ve posted below and click here for the full list of puzzles.

Next, have you ever wondered what it would be like to visit another dimension?   In 1884, Edwin A. Abbott wrote about life in the second dimension, in a nice little book called Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimesnions.  (Fun fact: the “A” in Edwin’s name stands for Abbott.  So his name is Edwin Abbott Abbott.)  Click on that link and you can read the whole book, if you like.  The book is about a world of flat beings who have no idea that the third dimension exists.  In the book, the main character, A Square, is visited by a sphere from the unknown world “above” him.  Kind of makes me wonder whether we’re just like the characters in Flatland, three-dimensional creatures ignorant of the fourth dimension that exists “above” us…

Well, the recently released movie Flatland 2: Sphereland deals with precisely that issue.  The Math Munch team had the opportunity to preview this movie, and we loved it.  In Sphereland, the granddaughter of the Square from Flatland, Hex, and her friend Puncto try to understand some mysterious triangles that Puncto thinks will cause the disastrous end of a space exploration mission and go on an adventure to help their three-dimensional friend Spherius with a problem he brought back from the fourth dimension.

Higher dimensions can be very difficult to wrap your head around.  This movie does a great job of helping the movie-watcher to understand how higher and lower dimensions relate to each other through the plot twists and challenges that the characters face.  You can really learn a lot about dimensions and the shape of space by watching this movie.  Plus, the characters are engaging and the images are fun.  Sphereland features the voices of a number of really great actors, including Kristen Bell, Danny Pudi, Michael York, and Danica McKellar.

Want to learn more about Sphereland?  Check out the trailer:

And, here’s an interview with Danny Pudi, the voice of Puncto, and Tony Hale, who does a fantastic job as the King of Pointland:

By the way, the makers of Sphereland also made a movie of Flatland!  The Math Munch team loved that one, too.  Here’s a link to the trailer.

Finally, check out this beautiful blog of mathematical doodles by high school math student and artist Chloé Worthington!  Chloé started mathematically doodling a few years ago in… well, in class.  When she doodles in class, Chloé is better able to focus on what’s going on and makes beautiful art.   (We at Math Munch encourage you to pay attention in class while you doodle.)

Chloé does all of her doodles by hand with ink pens.  She does a lot of work with triangles, as shown here.  One of her signature doodles is this nested puzzle piece doodle:

Doodling mathematically is one of the ways that Chloé does math and shares what she loves about it with the world.  She’s a trigonometry student, too.  How do you share what you love about math – or any other subject?

Bon appetit!