Family Math

Please welcome for your mathematical pleasure the Finger Lakes Paperfolders. They describe themselves as "basically a motley crew of origami enthusiasts who gather now and then to fold together". You may have seen them helping young people fold paper at the recent Light in Winter Hall of Wonders. However, they do not hesitate to delve into deep math, such as discussing rotational vs. reflection symmetry, tiling on a sphere vs. on a plane, and making sonobe units to explore chirality. You can read more about them at:
http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/FingerLakesPaperfolders/

And you can meet them in person at our next Math Club meeting this Sunday 3/21 at Ithaca College as described below.

Also coming up:

3/28 Electronics Quickly Taught for the Young and Youthful by Larry Clarkberg

4/4/10 (no club meeting)

4/11/10 Game Day: Bring a Game, Teach a Game, Learn a Game

4/18/10 Scratch Workshop by Larry Clarkberg

Saturday 4/24/10 Math Fun Day which is sort of like a science fair but math

4/25/10 (no club meeting)

-Larry

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The Family Math Club meets most Sundays from 2pm to 3:30pm on the third floor of Williams Hall on the Ithaca College Campus. Meetings are free and open to everyone. Both kids and adults report enjoying the club. To get to the club travel to South Hill on 96B. Turn into the Ithaca College main entrance. Go three fourths around the circle and then along a straight stretch. Take the first right (a sign here says "admissions"). Williams Hall is the second building on your left. There is usually parking nearby. Enter either the front or the back and take either the stairs or the elevator to the third floor.

Say you wanted to measure the Sun or the Moon or the distance to the stars. Would you need a very long tape measure, or is there some better way? Perhaps a way that requires some simple tools, some math, and some cleverness? This Sunday Larry McCrea will describe how basic geometrical knowledge can be used to measure objects and distances too large to be measured by conventional means. We will look at these three astounding feats:

* Eratosthenes measures the Earth
* Aristarchus measures the distance from Earth to the Sun and Moon, and estimates their sizes
* modern astronomers measure the distance to nearby stars by parallax

Join us!

Also: this Sunday is Pi Day, a celebration of the number Pi! (Think about it...March 14th, 3.14...) In observance of Pi Day lets have a pie potluck at Family Math Club.

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The Family Math Club meets most Sundays from 2pm to 3:30pm on the third floor of Williams Hall on the Ithaca College Campus. Meetings are free and open to everyone. Both kids and adults report enjoying the club. To get to the club travel to South Hill on 96B. Turn into the Ithaca College main entrance. Go three fourths around the circle and then along a straight stretch. Take the first right (a sign here says "admissions"). Williams Hall is the second building on your left. There is usually parking nearby. Enter either the front or the back and take either the stairs or the elevator to the third floor.

This Sunday meet Mike Stanley, a professional Math-Magician who combines Math, Magic and inspiration.  Kids will have great fun,  be challenged and intrigued.  The Math Magic program that Mike will lead will be interactive with a possible surprise for a lucky winner.  All ages are welcome--after Mike's presentation we will divided into age-related groups. If you like, bring a magic trick or card trick to share with your group. Special Bonus: Mike may do some puzzles based on Harry Potter. Tarantallegra!

-Larry

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The Family Math Club meets most Sundays from 2pm to 3:30pm on the third floor of Williams Hall on the Ithaca College Campus. Meetings are free and open to everyone. Both kids and adults report enjoying the club. To get to the club travel to South Hill on 96B. Turn into the Ithaca College main entrance. Go three fourths around the circle and then along a straight stretch. Take the first right (a sign here says "admissions"). Williams Hall is the second building on your left. There is usually parking nearby. Enter either the front or the back and take either the stairs or the elevator to the third floor.

Yo kids! This sunday our Math Club meeting will feature tiling and the work of artist M. C. Escher.  After a presentation by Edith McCrea we will divide into two groups. The younger kids will create art with physical objects and the older children will continue to experience the joy of creative dynamic tiling using the program APGS (which is a drawing program derived from SeeLogo). If you want to try APGS you can download it from:  http://www.familymath.org/seelogo

See you there!

-Larry

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The Family Math Club meets most Sundays from 2pm to 3:30pm on the third floor of Williams Hall on the Ithaca College Campus. Meetings are free and open to everyone. Both kids and adults report enjoying the club. To get to the club travel to South Hill on 96B. Turn into the Ithaca College main entrance. Go three fourths around the circle and then along a straight stretch. Take the first right (a sign here says "admissions"). Williams Hall is the second building on your left. There is usually parking nearby. Enter either the front or the back and take either the stairs or the elevator to the third floor.

The Computer Science Department in Partnership with the Math Department and www.familymath.org is offering a Lego Robotics workshop for elementary school children this Sunday February 21, 2:00 - 3:30 PM in Williams Hall 3rd floor. 

You will want to show up on time in order to catch the full flavor of this event.

-Larry

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The Family Math Club meets most Sundays from 2pm to 3:30pm on the third floor of Williams Hall on the Ithaca College Campus. Meetings are free and open to everyone. Both kids and adults report enjoying the club. To get to the club travel to South Hill on 96B. Turn into the Ithaca College main entrance. Go three fourths around the circle and then along a straight stretch. Take the first right (a sign here says "admissions"). Williams Hall is the second building on your left. There is usually parking nearby. Enter either the front or the back and take either the stairs or the elevator to the third floor.

Is my subject line too long? It doesn't leave much to be said here in the body of this email other than mentioning that details will be posted at:

http://familymath.org/math-club/schedule

-Larry

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The Family Math Club meets most Sundays from 2pm to 3:30pm on the third floor of Williams Hall on the Ithaca College Campus. Meetings are free and open to everyone. Both kids and adults report enjoying the club. To get to the club travel to South Hill on 96B. Turn into the Ithaca College main entrance. Go three fourths around the circle and then along a straight stretch. Take the first right (a sign here says "admissions"). Williams Hall is the second building on your left. There is usually parking nearby. Enter either the front or the back and take either the stairs or the elevator to the third floor.

Fractals are just shapes. However when you think "shape" you probably think of mundane every-day circles, squares and rectangles, right? And when you think "fractal" you think of exotic colorful swirly mind-boggling patterns that make trippy posters and t-shirts, right? The truth about which shapes are mundane and which are exotic is reversed from what you may think: fractals are in fact common in nature and it's those other shapes that are exotic. Step outside and see for yourself: the clouds, mountains, rivers, trees, and snowflakes are all fractals.

This Sunday let's share what we know about fractals, then do some hands-on stuff. For little hands I'll bring some cool paper cut-out and fractal drawing projects I have. For big keyboard-sized hands Dani will lead us drawing fractals with his SeeLogo software and Jasper will lead us drawing fractals with Context Free (see http://www.contextfreeart.org/).

-Larry

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The Family Math Club meets most Sundays from 2pm to 3:30pm on the third floor of Williams Hall on the Ithaca College Campus. Meetings are free and open to everyone. Both kids and adults report enjoying the club. To get to the club travel to South Hill on 96B. Turn into the Ithaca College main entrance. Go three fourths around the circle and then along a straight stretch. Take the first right (a sign here says "admissions"). Williams Hall is the second building on your left. There is usually parking nearby. Enter either the front or the back and take either the stairs or the elevator to the third floor.

A spiral is a curve which emanates from a central point. From this starting point begins beauty and mystery. This Sunday Ithaca College math professor Dani Novak will give a brief presentation about different kinds of spirals in math and nature, followed by activities.

You may be thinking "well I came to Family Math Club once and the activity was totally inappropriate for me or my loved ones". Fear not. This Sunday we plan to offer a variety of activities that all kinds of folks can appreciate in all kinds of ways. We'll be:

* weaving baskets
* using Spirographs (actual Spirograph sets from the 1960s! bring yours if you have one!)
* making dream catchers
* programming computers to create dazzling designs and games

See you there!

-Larry

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The Family Math Club meets most Sundays from 2pm to 3:30pm on the third floor of Williams Hall on the Ithaca College Campus. Meetings are free and open to everyone. Kids aged 8 to 13 have reported enjoying the club. To get to the club travel to South Hill on 96B. Turn into the Ithaca College main entrance. Go three fourths around the circle and then along a straight stretch. Take the first right (a sign here says "admissions"). Williams Hall is the second building on your left. Enter either the front or the back and take either the stairs or the elevator to the third floor. Consult http://ithaca.edu for parking ideas.

Family Math members will be staffing a table at the Light in Winter Festival's Hall of Wonders this weekend noon to 4pm both Saturday and Sunday. (Note that we won't be having our regularly scheduled Family Math Club meeting at Ithaca College.)

The Hall of Wonders is held at the Statler Atrium on the Cornell campus. We plan to have a table full of laptops running Scratch, the programming language for kids. And we plan to have another table full of math crafts enabling people to construct their own tanagrams, platonic solids, hexaflexagons, and fractals. There will be other tables with similarly-minded folks hosting similar activities.

This event will also feature the maiden voyage of the Family Math Club blimp.

See you there!

Here's what's coming up next on the Family Math agenda:

1/17/10 Quilt Squares by Edith McCrea. Appreciating patterns is one way to appreciate math. And few things are more purely patterns than quilts. Edith will talk a bit about the history and craft of quilt-making, and then we'll have a chance to construct our own paper quilt squares.

Saturday 1/23 and Sunday 1/24 12noon to 4pm Hall of Wonders. Family Math will have a couple of tables set up in the Hall of Wonders (a.k.a. the Statler atrium on the Cornell campus) as part of the Light in Winter Festival. We'll have math crafts, computer art stations, and a 6-foot long radio-controlled blimp. Come join us!