Some recent doodling, by me.
Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!
As you start a new school year, you might be looking for some new mathy doodle games to play in the margins of your notebooks. Doodling helps me to listen sometimes, and I love making neat patterns. I especially like seeing what new shapes I can make.
This summer I was very happy to run across Zentangle®—”an easy-to-learn, relaxing, and fun way to create beautiful images by drawing structured patterns.” I’ve learned a lot about Zentangle from a blog called Tangle Bucket by Sandy Hunter. She shares how to doodle snircles, snafoozles, and oodles. There’s a whole dictionary of zentangle shapes over at tanglepatterns.com.
My favorite idea in Zentangle is trying to combine two kinds of designs. Sometimes this is described as one pattern “versus” another one. For instance, check out these:
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Maybe you’ll pick some tangle patterns to combine with each other. If you try some, maybe you’ll share them in our Readers’ Gallery.
Sandy writes:
It’s so true that the more I tangle, the more I see the potential in patterns all around me. I catch myself mentally deconstructing them (whether I want to or not) to figure out if they can be broken down into simple steps without too much effort. That’s the trademark of a good tangle pattern.
Try some of Sandy’s weekly challenges, or check out Tiffany Lovering’s time-lapse videos—here’s one with music and one with an interview. Can you learn the names of any of the shapes she creates? I spy a Rick’s Paradox. There are lots of ways to begin zentangling—I hope you enjoy giving it a try.
Squares & dots & crosses, oh my!
If zentangling is too freeform for your doodling tastes, then let me share with you one of my longtime favorite websites. I’ve used it for years to help me to do math and to teach math, and it’s great for math doodling, too. I might even call it a trusty friend, one that I met one day through the simple online search: “free online graph paper”.
That’s right, it’s Free Online Graph Paper.
Something I love about the site is that it lets you design different aspects of your graph paper. Then you can print it out. First you get to decide what kind of grid you would like: square? triangular? circular? Then you get to tinker with lots of variables, like how big the grid cells are, how dark the lines are, and what color they are. And more!
Free Online Graph Paper was created by Kevin MacLeod, who composes music and shares it for free. That way other people can use it for creative projects. That’s really awesome! I enjoyed listening to Kevin’s “Winner Winner“. It’s always good to be reminded that everything you use or enjoy was almost certainly made by a person—including custom graph paper websites!
A 7/3 star spirocake.
Last up this week is some doodly math that you can really munch on. Everyone knows that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and that the most important food group is roulette curves.
To get your daily recommended allowance of groovy math, look no further than the edible doodles of Nathan Shields and his family over at Saipancakes.
I can wait until the Shields family tackles the cissoid of Diocles.
Bon appetit!
Math Munch 