The activities are drawn from common everyday experiences, but are enriched with examples from other cultures. There is the opportunity to walk into a Fibonacci spiral, to design your own fractal landscape, to measure an infinite coastline, and to look over Escher's shoulder as he analyzes the tilings in the Alhambra Palace and gains insights that radically transform his art. In Solving Problems , visitors try their hands at finding solutions to numerous problems they probably never thought of as math before. Mathematics, visitors learn, helps determine if a problem is solvable, and what the best solution might be. In Playing with Abstractions , the creative, imaginative side of mathematics breaks forth in dancing computer animations, intriguing sculptures, fanciful puzzles, and interactive models and experiments.
Visitors take an imaginary journey through the loops and turns of a knot.
They confront a strangely twisted band they can hold in their hand, and prove that it has only one edge and one side. Visitors can discover identical shadows in the projections of dissimilar objects. And they can explore what happens in a world where objects can twist, stretch, shrink, and turn inside out. Visitors find unexpected connections among a number of basic mathematical concepts, and learn that math actually involves creative play.