Photos by Ryan Kim/The Choate News
Math can be a particularly frustrating and confusing subject for many Choate students. Alan Luo ’18 is trying to change that mindset by creating a “Museum of Math.” The museum will consist of four to five exhibits exploring unconventional areas of mathematics. Luo plans to display the exhibits throughout Lanphier Center during the last two weeks of May. The project will be open for viewing to everyone.
In his museum, Luo will assemble a series of math experiments accompanied by informational documents. In one exhibit, he will display a bike using non-circular wheels. He explained, “There are certain objects that roll smoothly like a sphere but are not spheres. So, I might make a bike with those shaped wheels.The ability to construct a shape that has such properties is not easy to do by hand, and therefore, you need math to solve it.” In another exhibit, he hopes to arrange a pattern of strings that blend to form a circle. According to Luo, “You can have a grid of pegs and make a lot of straight lines and each of the strings represents a tangent line to the circle and therefore a derivative at a certain point. When you have a lot of them around one point, it looks like a circle. So what I plan to do – if facilities lets me do this – is take up the entire Lanphier courtyard and turn that into a demonstration.” The size of exhibits will range from the size of a courtyard to a laptop.
Luo created the museum to display fascinating applications of mathematics and combat negative mentalities toward the subject. He described, “The Museum of Math is an effort to make math more interesting for people and therefore make them want to learn it. And more importantly, to show that math isn’t this weird thing that exists in a vacuum; it actually has useful applications.”
Luo also has many disagreements with how math is taught in school curriculums. He specifically dislikes the linear nature of progress from Algebra to Calculus. High schools very rarely allow students to deviate from this path despite the vast amount of mathematical knowledge excluded from Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, PreCalculus, and Calculus. Many excluded areas of math do not exist beyond Calculus but rather exist parallel to these courses in terms of comprehensibility. The Museum of Math aims to expose viewers to these areas of math not covered by high school curriculums.
The project has been a work in progress since the beginning of spring term, and Luo has already faced many challenges in its creation. Most of his complications have stemmed from his doggedness to manufacture all the components of his project by himself instead of buying components from manufacturing companies. “Because I’m trying to restrict myself to the i.d. Lab’s resources to demonstrate how the i.d. Lab can be used, I end up having to narrow down all the designs,” he said. Despite long wait times in 3D printing amongst other issues, he has persisted in creating his museum.
Luo is stubborn in his use of self-manufactured materials because he wants viewers to realize the utility of the i.d. Lab. According to Luo, “I don’t want to outsource my production. I want to make everything by hand to show that anyone can develop the skills to make these things that are interesting and useful.” Most importantly, Luo wants to exhibit the more interesting aspects of mathematics. “I hope to rejuvenate interest in math and also show the applications of math and technology,” Luo said. “I just want them to think that math is cool.”
