Honestly, I would never have gone to a museum by myself but because I had to write a blog about it and I thought it was the easiest thing to do I went to the National Museum of Mathematics located a few blocks from Baruch campus. With my Baruch ID, I got access to everything as a normal visitor would. I always enjoyed doing math when I was younger so I was interested when I first saw the museum.
It was a small museum so I assumed that there wouldn’t be any thing that interests me but I was incorrect. Some of the exhibitions that stood out to me were the math square, wall of fire, and polypaint. The math square is a computerized floor that is all controlled by the movement of your feet. There were different mini games that you could play and for the wall of fire you can highlight the cross sections of different objects by using this laser that come out of the wall and the laser will be able to cut through the surfaces of the objects. Also, in the polypaint you can draw using a computer with a paintbrush using symmetry. I spent a lot of time just drawing on the polypaint because there were not too many people so I wouldn’t be hogging it and preventing other people from enjoying it because I went in the morning after classes. Of course there were many more and each of the exhibitions had to focus on the principles of mathematics, hence the name obviously. I learned a couple of new things about the ways how math works.
Overall my time inside was pretty fun. I thought it would just be a bunch of history facts on how Newton created calculus or a lesson about all the other math topics. I was in the museum for an hour and a half and I thought I would only take a picture and spend maybe twenty minutes and leave. But this assignment gave me the opportunity to explore something new and I don’t regret going.
