Can mathematically challenged warm up to numbing numbers?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 7, 1997 | by Leslie Alan Horvitz

For those who have never experienced infinity, here comes `Beyond Numbers,' a traveling exhibit that illuminates the mysterious world of mathematics for kid's and adults alike.

Mention "Mandelbrot set" and most people yawn. A brilliant v exhibit titled "Beyond Numbers," however, succeeds in making this and other arcane mathematical concepts interesting-even entertaining.

The traveling show, a collaboration of the Maryland Science Center and George Washington University currently on display at the Hall of Science in Queens, N.Y., is for children and adults (including those barely able to balance a checkbook). Its underlying philosophy: "Math is not just earthbound. Its patterns and relationships can be poked at, twisted and transformed to reveal new possibilities."

Toward this end, the exhibit encourages visitors to poke and twist the displays. The numerically challenged can play computer games, assemble magnetic tiles on a wall, experiment with soap bubbles -- all hands-on efforts intended to enliven abstract concepts such as Fibonacci number sequences, Mobius strips -- and Mandelbrot sets.

A Mandelbrot set is a particular kind of fractal, or a geometric pattern that repeats itself at ever smaller scales. "Do you want to zoom in on infinity?" a computer in the exhibit asks curious passersby In moments, the screen fills with what looks like a bird's eye view of a coastline, its undulating formations highlighted in blues and greens. Closeups reveal ever smaller patterns echoing the larger landscape, a process that can go on indefinitely.

Fractals are useful because they represent the way nature repeats itself. Each chamber of a nautilus shell, for instance, reveals a pattern identical to the one preceding it. By translating such patterns into mathematical terms and feeding them into a computer, scientists are able to explain all sorts of things, such as the flight of migrating birds, and make valuable predictions.

Architects and artists also have appropriated fractals. Indeed, the tiling and mosaics in the Alhambra, the splendid Moorish palace built in the 14th century, inspired Dutch artist M.C. Escher to create his famous paradoxical lithographs and woodcuts, a marriage of art and nature mediated by mathematics.

Besides fractals, visitors to "Beyond Numbers" can try their hands at problem-solving exercises such as the classic traveling-salesman puzzle. A salesman wants to travel to 25 cities taking the shortest route. Someone determined to compare all the possibilities would need more than 9 billion years! And that's even if he or she could perform 1 million calculations a second. Sometimes, the exhibit reminds us, we have to settle for less than perfect solutions -- good advice that transcends math problems. But even theoretical problems have real-life applications. The National Marine Fisheries in Mississippi used principles embodied in the traveling-salesman problem to help them track shrimp and fish in the Gulf of Mexico.

"Beyond Numbers" returns to patterns in its section on topology, a branch of mathematics that explores how one shape -- a cylinder or sphere, for example -- can be bent or stretched into another. The exhibit uses an animated matching game to explain the concept, challenging players to see whether a chair, say, can be turned into a cocktail glass or a knife into a coffee cup. As for its more serious uses, topology has helped biologists decipher the structure of life. All biochemical reaction inside in the human body involves strands of DNA that are knitted, twisted and coiled together.

Recent results of a national math test offered encouraging news for educators in February: Fourth-, eight hand 12th-grade students showed steady and significant progress over previous years. Other tests, however, show American students lagging behind the international average in math. "Beyond Numbers" will help them with a subject that should open their eyes to the world, not put them to sleep.

"Beyond Numbers" remains in Queens until April 13. It then will travel to Science Central in Fort Wayne, Ind., the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago; the Cranbrook Institute of Science in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.; and the Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond. The permanent exhibition is on view at the Maryland Science Center in Baltimore.