The A is in the mAth

In my position as co-founder of the Professional Development company Make It STEM, I've been asked, "What about the A for Art?" I agree "Make it STEAM" would be a kickass company name, but as a math fanatic I feel the A is in the math.

Before you groan, let me explain.

Think about Art, and what it means to you. I'm sure you're conjuring up images of liberation, creativity and fun. Everybody does art in their own way, and that's cool. There are no rules, only tools: paint, crayons, yarn, beads, clay, marble, metal, lights, LEGO, anything goes!

That's exactly the feeling I get when I think of Math. It's all about beautiful curves and symmetry and mysterious symbols that can do magic if you know how to use them. Add to that the idea that my "Art" can be used to help understand science and lots of other fields, and it just adds to its ridiculous usefulness. Yes, some people like to promote rigid, "hard" math, but it's OK, anything goes. I realize not everybody shares my opinion.

Picture somebody saying to you, "I hate Art." You'd think they were crazy! You might ask, "What do you mean, you hate Art?" They might tell you, "Ugh, it's all about brushes, and buying brushes, and it has to be the right brushes, and you gotta wash the brushes.... I flunked a painting class because of the damned brushes. Then I took a drawing class and it was all about having this pencil or that stump and where's your sketchbook? I couldn't draw a horse that looked like a horse so I flunked that class. That meant I couldn't be a forest ranger because I couldn't pass the Art requirement. I hate Art. It makes me feel stupid."

Hopefully you'd think there's something wrong with the way we teach Art!

I think there's something wrong with the way we teach Math, so I promote a very Artsy approach to it. Math teachers want their students to be able to visualize the topics they're presenting, so I train teachers how to use computer programming to graph functions and draw geometric shapes. The Astroid is one of my favorites:

To create this design, you have to know your x-y coordinates, and how to draw lines in whatever graphics package you're using (I love Python but this time I used p5.js). Loops make the job much easier. And once you can make one astroid, you save it to an astroid function and then you can make any number of astroids, anywhere on the screen and make them rotate:

See? It's Art! And it's dynamic and interactive: move the slider on the top left of the applet to change the number of lines in each astroid. That's what happens when you use variables: you can vary things: location, size, color, number of lines...

Get creative with all the classic "math" graphics and you'll learn a lot. It's not easy, but the payoff is immense!