Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Playful Math: Doodling to Aleph_null

I believe most people who really get mathematics are the ones who see the frivolity in much mathematical construction not as a flaw, but as a strength ( I am teasing my profession here). And sometimes presenting mathematics in playful ways is precisely the best way to expose deep meaning.

With a hat-tip to Engineering Innovation (@JHU_EI), a high school summer program in the Whiting School of Engineering here at Hopkins, I am reposting a video from one of their recent tweets.
Doodling in Math Class: Infinite Elephants
Have fun!

Oh, and BTW, we mathematicians tend to associate letters from other alphabets to important constants and concepts in our work. Aleph (the first Hebrew letter) is commonly used for measures of infinity. Aleph_null, or Aleph with the subscript zero, is used to denote a kind of infinity called countable infinity, and denotes the size of a set of objects that can be placed in a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers 1,2,3,... Jus'sayin'....

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

When I was board in my undergraduate classes, I would try to visualize the higher-dimensional uniform n-polytopes...

Richard Brown said...

Ahhhh..., then you have fallen into the professor's trap! You see, teaching mathematics is about much more than what is on the board, or in the textbook. It is about creating in a student the sense to use the imagination to explore deep relationships, meaning and concepts that exist only within mathematical constructions. At that point, math becomes an art that exists and has aesthetic value even if one cannot use ANY of the 5 senses to experience it. Sharing a mathematical construction at that point is a true, pure act of communication, because the entire construction is in the mind.

Your teacher bored you well!