Mathemagic to Inspire Creativity

I can’t tell you how many times I have screened elements of Disney’s Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land, either as a regular classroom teacher or as a floating sub when trying to inspire students in a math class to develop a shared fascination for the world around us and how math can really show us the beauty of our natural and imaginative world through an understanding of real and imaginary numbers and formulas and basic principles at play within it all.

In this post, I’ve gathered together some videos that I know can inspire students to become much more interested in math when connecting it to music, patterns, and relationships in the universe around us.

First, up is a 5-minute clip, focusing on math and music, taken from Donald Duck’s original 27 minute trip into Mathmagic Land, from 1959.

Next up is a series of videos I just watched today for the first time exploring the Mandelbrot Set of numbers, as well as the Julia set of numbers. You may recognize the resulting images as a type of visual art that was particularly popular in the 1980s when the Mandelbrot set was first identified.

Mandelbrot Set

The Mandelbrot Set refers to a fractal that a man named Benoit Mandelbrot generated from a simple mathematical equation with the help of computers.  If you were able to zoom into the image below indefinitely, you would find that the pattern repeats infinitely.

For more great videos that I’m saving to a growing playlist of mathmagic videos, check out this Youtube playlist I’ve recently started and feel free to reach out to me and send me other videos you’d recommend for this playlist as well.