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April 25, 2001
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The Art Angle
| Mosaic Answers |
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Mosaics get their beauty from an arrangement of small chips and tiles that form a larger picture or design. How many tiles do you think there are in the mosaic picture to the right? That's one of the problems students have been solving when they tour the BMA galleries as part of the program, The Art Angle: Math at the Art Museum. Museum docent Barry Leven—an electrical engineer by training—leads many of those tours. He says that youngsters respond to art when they find a connection to real life and that math can help. Leven likes to show the students a mosaic floor from the ancient city of Antioch. "I say that we're trying to figure out how long it takes to make this floor and how much it could cost to have made it," Leven explains. Getting to the answers involves dividing the sprawling mosaic floor into equal, small rectangles or squares and then sampling the number of tiles in one of them. Using that number, the students estimate the number of tiles in the entire floor. Leven then asks students to think of how many tiles an artisan could set in an average hour, to figure out the number of hours needed to complete the job, and to calculate how much the job would cost at today's hourly wages. And you thought you were just looking at a pretty picture. |
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Paintings and sculptures can provide amazing illustrations of mathematics in action. That's the message students and teachers are getting from an innovative program at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA). Where can you find the math connections at the BMA?
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Math Is Everywhere |
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At first, the BMA did not offer its math and art program directly to students. "We started the program as a response to various groups of teachers who wanted to teach important concepts in math through artwork," says the BMA's Linda Andre, who began creating the math and art activities for teachers to use in their classrooms six years ago. Maryland's new state educational standards—which encourage teachers to take an interdisciplinary approach to their subjects—also gave a boost to Andre's efforts. But this past school year, the museum extended the program to classes of students visiting the BMA. So far, more than 20 groups have visited the BMA for math tours. The math concepts that students and their teachers discover in the BMA' s galleries can start simply. For instance, a thousand-year-old clay object from Mexico embodies the concept of addition: it has literally been built by adding clay strips, which are visible to the viewer. Likewise, a carved nineteenth century African headdress began as part of a tree from which the carver subtracted wood. |
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Math is everywhere in the BMA's art collection:
| A Sense of Proportion |
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Try this activity, developed by the BMA, using the diagram to the right, a tape measure, and the chart below.
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Then there are the more complicated notions, such as proportionality. The BMA deals with this concept by introducing several sculptures, including a short, big-headed figure called "Man with a Loin Cloth" and a tall, small-headed figure named "Man Pointing." The math problem here is to figure out what percentage of the whole body each head represents.
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"For some students who are not natural mathematicians, this is another way to get into the subject," says BMA docent Barry Leven. "If the teacher can show that there are math ideas in areas you wouldn't ordinarily associate with math, then the students will buy in right away. It makes for a different kind of day in the classroom." |
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