Welcome to our third IMAGINARY newsletter!

Spring has arrived and math communication and math outreach in all its facets is blossoming everywhere. We are part of many exciting new events, ideas, collaborations, and exhibitions. Please join our upcoming activities in Uruguay, Norway, Spain, Germany, Austria, Hungary, South Africa, and Russia. Also be part of two great conferences, the MATRIX conference for Mathematics museums in Dresden and the AIMS-IMAGINARY workshop-exhibition for math communication in Africa, to be held in Cape Town, both in fall this year. More details below, enjoy!

Your IMAGINARY Team 

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Table of Content

• South Korea
• SURFER in Uruguay
• Africa
• Amazing events 2014
• Dresden
• Crystallography and Digital Society
• Mathematics of Planet Earth
• Network
• Highlighted Content

IMAGINARY in South Korea IMAGINARY and the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach signed a collaboration agreement with the National Institute for Mathematical Sciences (NIMS) in Daejung to carry out several IMAGINARY exhibitions and projects in South Korea. A big IMAGINARY exhibition will be held at the ICM-2014 (International Congress of Mathematicians), which will take place in August 2014 in Seoul. ICM is the largest congress in the mathematics community and is held once every four years. The Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize, the Gauss Prize and the Chern Medal are awarded during the opening ceremony on the first day of the congress. This year, the BRIDGES math art conference will be held at the same time as the ICM in Seoul, at the Gwacheon National Science Musem. We invite you to send us your latest images, films, 3d-data for sculptures or software programs - to be included in the ICM exhibition.
  SURFER in Uruguay As part of Plan Ceibal in Uruguay, 24000 notebooks delivered to high school students will have the programs SURFER and Morenaments program installed. Furthermore, the two programs are part of a free update for more than 150000 student laptops. Plan Ceibal is an Uruguayan initiative to provide each student and each teacher in public schools with a free laptop. The project aims at distributing technology, promoting knowledge, and generating social equity. The acronym “Ceibal” stands for Basic Informatic Educative Connectivity for Online Learning (Conectividad Educativa de Informática Básica para el Aprendizaje en Línea) and was chosen for the ceibo tree’s symbolic meaning to the Uruguayan people known in English as Cockspur coral tree. The collaboration between IMAGINARY and Plan Ceibal is jointly carried out with the Centro de Matemática, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de la República, Montevideo.
  IMAGINARY and math communication in Africa Together with AIMS-South Africa, we will organize the workshop-conference “Maths Communication in Africa” from November 5-7, 2014. We invite you and the math communication community to join this workshop! Its objective is to exchange experiences in communicating mathematics internationally with a focus on the African continent as well as to plan concrete math outreach activities in various African countries. More details regarding the program and registration can be found here. The Mathematical Association of Tanzania in collaboration with the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) celebrated its 10th anniversary of the national Pi-Day on the 13th and 14th of March 2014. In order to fuel the collaboration between AIMS and IMAGINARY, an interactive exhibit of SURFER was displayed at this event held in Dar es Salaams Mnazi Mmoja Park. It was attended by over two thousand school children and their teachers from 3 Universities, 33 Secondary Schools, 14 Primary Schools and one Teacher Resource Centre, see this blog entry for details.   Amazing number of events in 2014  January 16. We started the year with a public talk by Prof. Dr. Gerhard Huisken at the University of Tübingen, Germany, about IMAGINARY and the MFO.   March 10 - June 30. Small IMAGINARY exhibition at the Max Planck Gymnasium in Göttingen, Germany. This exhibition is a school project which is based on the contents of the IMAGINARY-Entdeckerbox.   March 10 - 14. IMAGINARY gave a talk and presented the Entdeckerbox at the GDM-meeting in Koblenz, Germany.   March 13 + 14. Pi-Day celebration in Dar Es Salaam, Tansania (see more info above).
  March 25 - June 22. RSME-IMAGINARY in Logroño, Spain. It is accompanied by an exhibition of historical geometric models from the 19th century.
  March 27 - June 30. Mathematics of Planet Earth at the Deutsches Technikmuseum, Berlin, Germany (see more info below).
  April 2 - 4.  The SURFER program was presented at the Libre Graphics meeting in Leipzig, Germany, which is the largest gathering of open source projects in the field of computer graphics.   April 7 - 11. IMAGINARY exhibition in Orenburg, Russia, located at the natural border of Europe and Asia.
  April 12. Presentation of IMAGINARY at the meeting of the presidents of the natinonal mathematical societies in Istanbul, by Gert-Martin Greuel.
  April 14 -August 29. Exhibition “Frontiers of Mathematics” by our IMAGINARY user Torsten Stier in Idstein, Germany.    April 22 - 24. There will be an IMAGINARY poster at the ECSITE conference in Den Haag, Netherlands.   April 25. IMAGINARY will participate at the event “Tübinger Fenster für Forschung” organized by the University Tübingen, Germany.   Starting May 26. IMAGINARY exhibition at the Vitensenteret Sørlandet in Arendal, Norway.
  June 12 - 15. Gert-Martin Greuel will give a talk at the Humboldt Kolleg in Kyiv, Ukraine. The talk will primarily treat IMAGINARY and the philosophy behind the project.
  June 21 - July 5. “Forms and Formulas” Exhibition in Mosonmagyaróvár, Hungary, hosted by FUTURA “Interactive Science Experience Center”.   July/September. It is planned to present IMAGINARY in Heidelberg and also at the second Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Heidelberg, Germany.
  July 1 - 3. Math-Art-Music workshop for kids at the KinderUniKunst in Vienna, Austria   July 19. IMAGINARY presents its “Entdeckerbox” and a small IMAGINARY installation at the “Math Day“ organized by the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany. 
  August 15 - 20. ICM exhibition Seoul in collaboration with NIMS, South Korea (see more info above).
  September 18 - 20. MATRIX conference in Dresden, Germany (see more info below).
  November 5 - 7. AIMS-IMAGINARY workshop-exhibition ”Maths Communication in Africa” in Cape Town, South Africa.
  More events are planned, we will keep you up to date. You find all upcoming events in our IMAGINARY events calendar.

MATRIX conference in Dresden IMAGINARY will be part of the MATRIX (Mathematics Awareness, Training, Resource & Information Exchange) conference to be held for the first time from the 18th -20th September 2014 in Dresden, Germany, organized by the National Museum of Mathematics New York and the Erlebnisland Mathematik Dresden. The goal of the conference is to share ideas, experiences, best practices, and, above all, to help improve public perception of and engagement with mathematics. Representatives from mathematics museums around the world will attend, as well as people who design/create/operate math exhibits and those who perform math outreach or deliver math programming designed for a popular audience. For details on the programme and the conference please see the MATRIX conference web page matrix. momath.org.
  Crystallography and Digital Society In collaboration with Philatelie Liechtenstein, two special postage stamps will be released for the International Year of Crystallography 2014. Each stamp shows a different sequence of six pictures taken from an animation created with the SURFER program. Additionally, a free smartphone application is offered using augmented reality technology to identify the stamps and start the original SURFER-animation. The German “Science Year 2014 - The Digital Society” focuses on the impact of the digital revolution. IMAGINARY is “science communication 2.0” and our Mathematics of Planet Earth exhibition shown at the German Museum of Technology is one of the events of the Science Year (read more below).   MPE continues and is shown at the Deutsches Technik Museum The succesfull year-long initiative Mathematics of Planet Earth (MPE) will continue past 2013. For all upcoming activities please consult the web site www. mathsofplanetearth.com. A newly designed MPE exhibition is shown at the Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin. It is organized by the museum in collaboration with the FU Berlin and IMAGINARY. The exhibition features three interactive stations on glaciers, volcanic ash - two winning projects of the MPE2013 competition - and a new one on tsunamis. They are presented at touch screens that can be used interactively by the visitors and provide a lot of background information on the simulation of these natural phenomena and their mathematical models. The exhibition was inaugurated on March 27th and can be visited until June 27th.   IMAGINARY math communication network We are planinng to start a new networking project for professionals of math communication. The objective is to support the community of math communicators, and to stimulate the exchange of experiences and ideas between members of the network. Math and science museums, traveling exhibitions, individuals devoted to spreading the beauty of mathematics - all these agents are not competitors, but rather provide outreach services that can benefit from an active exchange of experiences, opinions, and strategies. The first three concrete projects to work on are an ongoing collection of ideas for math communication services, a comprehensive list and map of all museums with great collections on mathematics around the world, and a joint and open math communication calendar.

Highlighted content

Francesco de Comité from the University of Lille, France, created beautiful models first with POVRay and Blender and then asked a 3D printing company to produce real world objects. In his gallery he shows photographs of his models.

Torolf Sauermann, a German math artist, added the so called ‘Droste-effect’ to images he created using the SURFER program. The effect is named after the design of cocoa powder boxes of the company ‘Droste’ picturing a nurse carrying a box picturing a nurse carrying a box picturing a nurse… well, you get the idea.
You can find a selection of these stunning pictures in his gallery.

In the application Frozenlight by Zoltan Palmer circular shaped mirrors which are arranged in a grid-like manner reflect a light ray according to the reflection law of geometric optics. While random positions of the light source produce chaotic reflections, it is possible to position the light source so that beautiful symmetric patterns are created. You can interactively change parameters like light source position, circle radius and rotation angle of the lattice. Through a simple menu it is possible to select and explore a wide range of symmetric reflection patterns.

 

“IMAGINARY — open mathematics” is a project by the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach and supported by the Klaus Tschira Stiftung.

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