Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Mathematical Art: Cartesian Creations and Grandfathers of Jungle Gyms

Sol Lewitt looks like the grandfather of crafting in virtual space. Wait a minute. . .  He enamels too. Ideas for projects here:



Looks kind of like a jungle gym. By the way, George Boole, namesake for Boolean Algebra including things like Boolean Difference and Boolean Split, is literally the grandfather of the jungle gym. His grandson, Sebastian Hinton, invented the device based on a structure, which his father built for him as a child.

"Hinton's father, a mathematician, had built a similar structure from bamboo when Hinton was a child; his father's goal was to enable children to achieve an intuitive understanding of 3-dimensional space through a game in which numbers for the x, y, and z axes were called out and each child tried to be the first to grasp the indicated junction. Thus the abstraction of Cartesian coordinates could be grasped as a name of a tangible point in space."

(http://winnetkahistory.org/gazette/j-is-for-jungle-gym/)



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