Different perspectives: literal and metaphorical

Professor Julian Fleron of Westfield State College recently shared an awesome video his students created, illustrating (literally) that different perspectives can be both literal and metaphorical. 

Fleron had attended one of our Viewpoints workshops at the turn of the millennium, and has been using some of our materials in his incredibly innovative classes.   He and his colleagues run a nationally-known project called "Discovering the Art of Mathematics", and he described his student project in this blog post. 



He writes,

There’d been some incidents of intolerance on our campus during the semester. When I came into the very next class the students took over. There was a chorus of "We want to do something like this to address the issues on campus and that we see in the news all of the time." 

So that’s what we did for the last month of the semester. We created, invented and explored different ways that we could use mathematical art to make statements about hatred and intolerance. At the end of the course students presented their ideas and small proof of concept models. Sadly, we didn’t have time or resources to create large-scale models.

He continues to describe how the student models inspired this piece of lenticular art, composed of different hanging pieces of different width.  Check out his post!  It's a lovely example of how seeing math and art can help us "picture" the world as well.