wanderwalls

In Florence, one of the cities with the biggest artistic heritage in the world, there is a very special museum: “il Giardino di Archimede”. No, that’s not the famous scientist’s garden, it’s a museum in which you discover and –unbelievable- have fun with Math. I know what you’re thinking and I’m not crazy and neither a nerd, but I went there on a school trip and it really was surprising: it was a rainy day and we had to take a bus to get there from the Uffizi and when we arrived it wasn’t what we expected at all.
The place was colorful and the workers explained us with easy terms the basis of Math, Physics and Geometry and demonstrated them by making us do some easy experiments. We learned some applications of Geometry –if you whisper something in a place your friends in another selected place at the other side of the room will hear you strong and clear thanks to some properties of parabolas- and played with bubble blowers of different shapes. Bubble blowers? Maybe you don’t know –I certainly didn’t- that they form by using the least possible space and based on this property of theirs is a kind of structure called tensile structures, which are very used in modern architecture and are having a lot of success right now.
After this discovery we played with parabolas again –yes, insulting you friends from far is really that funny- and tried to solve enigmas with very little success. Playing with Pitagora’s theorem as a puzzle and making observations about gravity has been funny, I know that’s hard to believe but it really helped us to better understand the subjects, maybe because it made us see the applications of Math –which everybody always sees as an abstract subject- in real life.