Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

Before we start, a little business. You may have noticed that posts have been few and far between lately. Those of you who know us, the members of the Math Munch Team, know that we’ve all made a lot of life changes in the past year or two. We started out together teaching in the same school in New York– but now we live on far corners of the country and spend our time doing very different things. In case you’re curious, here are some pictures of the things we’ve been up to!

Justin’s genus 19, rotationally symmetric surface

Paul’s hexagon parquet deformations

Anna’s math art book

But even though we’ve moved apart physically, we’ve decided that we really want to keep the Math Munch Team together. We LOVE sharing our love of math with you– and we love hearing from you about the amazing things you make and do with math, too.

So, we’ve decided to revamp our posting process and came up with a schedule for when you can expect posts. There will be a new post every Thursday. (Though if Anna is posting from the West Coast, it might come out in the wee hours of Friday morning for some of you!) And here’s the monthly schedule of Thursday posts:

• The first Thursday of the month will be a post from Justin
• The second Thursday of the month will be a rerun!! Did you know we have over 150 posts on this site?? And we’ve been posting for almost five years??
• The third Thursday of the month will be a post from Anna
• The last Thursday of the month will be a post from Paul

And for those mysterious months with five Thursdays (ooh, when will that be, I wonder?)… There will be a surprise!

And now… for some math!

First up is a little game called SolveMe Mobiles! This game is full of little puzzles in which you have to figure out what each of the different shapes in a mobile weighs. You’re given different clues in different puzzles. So, for instance, in the puzzle to the left, you’re given the weight of the red circle and you have to figure out how much a blue triangle is. But you’re not given the weight of the whole mobile… Hmmm…

And this one, to the right, gives you the weight of one of the shapes and of the whole mobile– but now there are three shapes! Tricky!

Even better, you can build your own mobile puzzle for others to solve! I made this one, shown below– like my use of a mobile within a mobile?

Next up, I found a beautiful Tumblr account that I’d like to share with you full of pictures of found mathematical objects. It’s called… Mathematical Objects! (How clever.) The author of the site writes that the aim of the blog is to “show that mathematics, aside from its practicality, is also culturally significant. In other words, mathematics not only makes the trains run on time but also fundamentally influences the way we view the world.

“Counting to One Hundred with my Four-Color Pen”

Some of the images are mathematical art, like the one above; others are more “practical,” such as plans for buildings or images drawn from science.

Do you ever see an interesting mathematical object in the wild and feel the urge to take a picture of it? If so, go ahead and send it to us! We’d love to see what you find.

I’m very excited to share this last find with you all. It was sent to me by a wonderful math teacher, Mark Dittmer, and his math students. This year, they were inspired by Math Munch to make their own fun online math sites! I think what they made is super awesome– and I want to share it with you. I’ll be featuring some of their work in my next few posts, one thing at a time to give each its own day in the sun. First up is this adorable adventure story about the residents of Number Land. I hope you enjoy it!

Bon appétit!