Momath has taken on the slogan ‘the coolest thing that ever happened to Math?’ But is it really?
Ok I’ll admit, I didn’t go to this museum as it just wasn’t appealing to me other than the Pi symbol on the door handle made me snigger. So I’m writing this based on the reviews of an Accountant and a Primary School teacher who thought it was the coolest concept out there…
Step into the 19,000 square foot National Museum of Mathematics math enthusiasts /nerds? will stand in awe as you expect to see a side of math you’ve never seen before. You get to explore exhibits and take part in activities as this museum is meant to be touched and figured out with explanatory screens and museum guides to answer your questions of how and why.
You can ride the square wheeled trike that actually offers a smooth ride because it runs on a bumpy, curved surface. Or play with gravity on the Tracks of Galileo which examines the curve that will allow an object to slide from one point to another in the least amount of time.
Then you have the human tree which creates a fractal tree where each branch is a smaller version of the tree. The exhibit models self-similarity, where a smaller piece of the object looks like a miniature copy of the entire object. Examples of self-similarity in nature include trees, mountains and coastlines. Human Tree was developed by Theodore Gray, inventor of the wooden periodic table-table.
Then there’s the Enigma Cafe, where you can do puzzle solving of a variety of objects, from disentangling intertwined metal to arranging geometric shapes into prescribed patterns to your hearts content.
At $15 a pop, the Teacher and the Accountant had high hopes for this museum…unfortunately they didn’t think that much of it. They reported that most people just walked up to a station, press a few buttons but don’t really understand what to do and the math behind the activity. Maybe you really do have to be a 4th grader to truly enjoy it.
Momath 11 East 26th Street, New York, NY 10010, between Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue
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