Two previous Homeschool Wednesdays covered the relationship between math and beauty as a different way of motivating the study of math. My first presentation was on spirals and the second one on waves. In each case the main point I am trying to make for our kids is how relatively simple mathematical formulas can generate magnificent patterns found in nature. Another area where this is true are fractals. These self similar patterns often have surprisingly simple underlying algorithms:
http://www.eddaardvark.co.uk/python_patterns/images/mbex4_anim.gifUnfortunately the great animated GIFs that I found for the second half don’t render in Slideshare (they work beautifully in Keynote). But you can find them via the links on the last two slides. Here I am embedding the awesome last one which shows 63 levels of zooming into the Mandelbrot set and was created by John Whitehouse (who has many amazing math patterns on his website):
Seeing this has me excited about the deep mystery of how all of this complexity emerges from such simplicity (see Slide 13 above for the equation that drives this). I hope it will have the same effect for our children.
