Clockwise from top right: maths helps people recognise the ginko tree; visitors touch the coloured spheres to make music; the learning continues outside
I need to go to the grocery store, post
office and bank and stop off at the school to pick up a child – what order should I do that in? You’re using math when you make those calculations in your mind. GW: Yes! Companies like FedEx pay
mathematicians good money to figure out exactly that: what is the most efficient route from A to B. CL: Glen does math tours that under-
score the fact that math is all around us: in the timing of a traffic light, the way the subway runs. We have a place that sells ice cream shakes near the museum that has very long lines and Glen has taken people there to talk about queuing theory, or he’ll talk about the math in the way certain plants grow. GW: The gingko tree is a good exam-
ple. It’s a tree you see fairly often in New York City and one that everyone is able to recognise at a glance, though they don’t really know why. It’s because, unlike most other trees, all of the junctions of its branches are right angles. It’s not some- thing most people realise, but when you have it pointed out to you, you say, aha, there it is! It’s the geometry of the tree that gives you the ability to recognise it.
AM 2 2014 ©Cybertrek 2014
What common mathematical mistakes do people make? GW: There are certain aspects of math that people are naturally quite adept at, but there are other areas where our intuition leads us astray. One of the most notorious is assessing risks and probabilities. An important example is in medicine, when you have a routine screening for a rare condition and you get a positive result. You ask, “How reliable is this test?” and the doctor says: “Well, it’s 99 per cent accurate: 99 per cent of the time, if it says you have the disease, you have the disease.” So you immediately think, “Oh no, there’s a 99 per cent chance I have this disease!” But that’s not at all the case. If the
disease has a frequency of only one in 10,000 in the population at large, it’s actually extremely likely that you’ve got a false positive, just because the original disease is so unlikely. Even though only one per cent of positives are false posi- tives, it’s much more likely that you’re that one in 100 than the one in 10,000 that actually has the disease. So people do have difficulty
understanding probabilities and it can
lead to errors of judgement. It’s called the base rate fallacy.
What’s next for MoMath? CL: We’re working on a number of programme ideas right now, so we’re back in fundraising mode. For example, there’s a lot of interest in having a math and music concert series here. GW: We’re also commissioning our first
new exhibits since we opened. One is entitled Motion Scape and will help visi- tors better understand the relationship between position, velocity and accelera- tion. The other is a dramatic lobby piece.
What drives you? GW: The opportunity to share the beauty and wonder of mathematics. CL: The excitement of coming up with
ideas, then the pleasure of watching people enjoy the things we’ve created. l
Rhianon Howells is a freelance writer for numerous publications including The Guardian
rhianonhowells@gmail.com
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