Lisa Grossman, physical sciences and space reporter
MATHEMATICS is awesome, full stop. That's the philosophy behind a new museum opening next week in New York City.
The founders of the Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) know they have a fight on their hands, given the pervasive idea that the subject is boring, hard and scary. But they are determined to give mathematics a makeover, with exhibits that express an unselfconscious, giddy joy in exploring the world of numbers and forms.
"We want to show a different side of mathematics," says museum co-founder Cindy Lawrence. "Our goal is to get kids excited, and show them the math they're doing in school is just one tree in a whole huge forest."
To this end, mathematics pervades every aspect of the design, sometimes in surprising places. Take the museum's Enigma Caf?. At first glance, it looks like any other trendy, modern Manhattan cafe. But instead of coffee, puzzles will be served. And a careful look reveals that the floor is a 6-by-6 grid, the walls are made of Tetris-like puzzle shapes called pentominoes, and the tables are arranged as a knight would progress across a chessboard.
"We try to hide math everywhere," says Lawrence.
The inspiration for MoMath came shortly after a beloved but dated museum on Long Island closed down in 2006. MoMath co-founder Glen Whitney, a former hedge fund analyst specialising in algorithms, got a group together to fill the void, but for months all they did was talk - until they were offered a booth at the 2009 World Science Festival in New York.
"There was a bit of a debate amongst the group about whether we should accept that offer because, in fact, we didn't really have anything to put in a booth," Lawrence says.
But accept it they did, and the deluge of ideas they had for the booth overflowed into a travelling exhibit called the Math Midway. The Midway in its turn laid the groundwork for the full-scale museum, scheduled to open on 15 December in Madison Square Park.
MoMath exhibits take abstract concepts like number theory and topology and let you put your hands and even feet all over them. Take Coaster Rollers: the exhibit is a cart sitting atop a tray full of rubber shapes that look like other-worldly acorns.
These forms are all "surfaces of constant width" - a shape whose highest point is always the same height above a table, no matter which way you turn it. Spheres are the most famous example, but it turns out there are an infinite variety of shapes with the same property. My cart flies over the alien acorns as smoothly as if it were running on ball bearings. I've learned something new about topology, but more than that, I climb off the cart grinning and full of adrenalin. The idea is cemented: mathematics is kinetic. It's active.
It is also creative. The museum has a design studio called the Mathenaeum that lets visitors design geometric figures that may have never been dreamed of before. Designs created one day will be 3D printed the next, and put on display the day after that.
The space is often beautiful. The museum's main staircase spirals around a two-storey paraboloid - a parabola that has been spun around a central pole to make a 3D sculpture. The shape is laced with ropes of lights that run between points on the paraboloid where the radius is a whole number. The design, shot through with mathematics, is mesmerising.
Each exhibit has been designed to feel like a different place with a different style: a Renaissance pavilion, a Gothic cathedral, a military site, a cafe. "They're places you can occupy," says chief of design Tim Nissen. "The idea is that math is actually out there in the world, and we brought it in here," he says, not that mathematics is something you can only find in a museum.
The MoMath team has big hopes for a broader impact. It's widely acknowledged that children in the US are falling behind in the subject. A member of the US National Security Agency, which employs more mathematicians than any other organisation in the country but only hires US citizens, once told Lawrence that in his view, the biggest threat to national security is the lack of US-born mathematicians. But politicians and teachers rarely agree on the best way to address the shortage.
Lawrence has no doubts: the problem is in rote learning in school. "It's like teaching kids to read music, and never even telling them that instruments exist," she says. "You don't fix that by more testing. You do it with a cultural institution that can change the norms and perceptions about math - we want to be that place."
Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) opens 15 December in New York
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