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Maths on Paper at Tūranga 

 

On Saturday 17th February, the fourth floor of Christchurch's central library Tūranga was buzzing. It was hosting Mathateca with Maths on Paper, an all-day drop in event exploring all sorts of recreational maths activities through the medium of paper.

 

The activities featured included mathematical origami, slice-form figures of cones and graphs, fractal cards, pen-and-paper games such as “Sprouts,” “Dots and Boxes” and “Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe,” and logic puzzles such as nonograms, KenKens and Tri-Alphametics.

 

Mathateca provided a display of unusual historical slide rules that were designed for calculating things such as the distance between cities in Europe, mortgage payments (with up to 18% interest!), or the health effects of a nuclear bomb. We also made use of the occasion to promote several exciting maths books in the library collection.

 

Complementing the activities, the afternoon also saw three guest speakers each deliver a brief talk digging deeper into the maths behind the activities:

 

The first speaker of the day, James McGowan, is the only New Zealander to go to the World Puzzle Championships. He spoke about how to approach solving various interesting logic puzzles including Yajilins.

 

The second guest speaker was Merlyn Barrer, a student of Mathematics at UC and expert origami designer. He spoke about the mathematics behind designing origami sculptures, including circle-packing.

 

Speaker number three, our very own Dr Ross Atkins, spoke about the strategy of the two-player pen-and-paper game "sprouts." Sprouts is a game that's easy to learn but has surprising complexity and is still unsolved by mathematicians.

 

The speakers kindly stuck around for the rest of the afternoon and engaged in some great conversations with attendees, many of whom had insightful and stimulating questions raised by the talks. 

 

The event was very popular and exceeded expectations, with over 100 visitors recorded as dropping in over the course of the day. It was fantastic to see how well it appealed to all ages, with families, university students and retirees alike getting stuck into the maths activities. Some passing tourists were delighted to be able to take handouts home to their grandkids.

 

On the feedback forms collected from the event, the most common answer to the question “What did you like about this event?” was “Everything!” - that's maths enthusiasm in action.

 

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Check out the "Maths on Paper" section of our downloads page to access the handouts from the event.

 

Our instruction sheets were made especially for the event, and some made use of library resources such as its in-house laser cutter. Mathateca is keen for the activities to be used again and some of the paper crafts and games may well be making a reappearance in future library events. If you are interested, get in touch with us for more info.