Seattle MathJam: Paper Folding in a Pub

Its been about a year since I last wrote about MathsJam: seattle-mathjam-or-pints-and-polynomials.  So it feels like time to post an update. (See: mathsjam.com if you have no idea what I’m writing about)   I’ve been hosting a meeting once a month now since last August.  For the last several months we’ve been hovering at five attendees. They’re never quite the same set of people and I’ve been growing the mailing list so it seems like we’re on the cusp of getting a little bigger. I have yet to figure out the way to aggressively publicize something as quirky as this so the growth remains a slow burn. However, my long term vision is about two tables of folks per night and there are enough people already to make the get together fun so I’m not in a hurry.

The pattern we’ve fallen into is I bring a few extra things that have caught my attention during the month and we chat and do part of the problem/puzzles in the “Shout” provided by the MathsJam folks as  well over 2+ hours.  What I like is that while we do have interesting mathematics conversations we also stay focused on playing with the math during the night. So far we have avoided  what I like to call “Book Club Syndrome.”

The key in planning is to look at the Shout enough time in advance to gather all the extra material needed.  This month, I didn’t have enough chess  boards at home so I decided we would probably skip that piece. I also didn’t have the proper origami paper but decided I would substitute with some thin graphing paper instead.

I expected folding would be fun and so we started with the Hexahedroflex.  Sadly I had picked a companion folding exercise from Eric Demaine to add on but left the sheets at home. We’ll have to try this out next month.

Link:  http://erikdemaine.org/puzzles/CubeFolding/MathFest2019/

We also spent a fair amount of time on the Cutting grid Puzzle which I think I’ll probably take and use with the kids.

Finally: I added on my favorite small geometry piece from this month:

https://mymathclub.blogspot.com/p/collected-problems-4.html#p22

And a brief discussion of what the following is asking:

All in all it was another fun night. Looking forward, I’m tempted to try to arrange a get together with the other group that meets in Tacoma.