Recreational Math

What is Recreational Math? There hasn’t been a direct answer to this question or specific definition for it. We do know however that Recreational Math stimulates the use of mathematics in a creative way rather than using the traditional methodology.

Recreational math involves mathematical puzzles and games as well as art and is often appealing to children and untrained adults, inspiring their further study of the subject.

Please read on the article by my 12-year old daughter who happens to be an art lover, but not the most passionate Math student.

Recreational Math Ideas

“I love art and am an amateur artist myself. An interesting fact is that art can be used in math. Say you have a circle. Start filling it up with other circles, and you have an amazing drawing. And, coincidentally, you did this with an infinite series, a subject in math. So here are some recreational math/art projects that were inspired by ViHart.

The first project is the Infinite Dungeon Town. This can be made with the Koch Curve (which does not look anything like a curve). First, draw an equilateral triangle. Next, draw equilateral triangles on two sides of the first. Keep doing this, and you will have an Infinite Dungeon. You can make it into a town, or you can dragon-ize it and make it a Hungarian Horntail from Harry Potter. If you draw a triangle on each side, you could probably even make a snowflake.

Now moving on to infinite series. These are great if you want to kill time. For a great example, try this exercise. Make an elephant and have it cover exactly half the page. Now draw another elephant that covers a fourth of the page. Now make one that covers one eighth, one-sixteenth, and so on. It’s pretty cool because you can have an infinite caravan that you can still fit all the way across the page. If you’re really bored, try the exercise with camels that cover one-third of the page. The real fun in infinite series is how they can multiply into, well, infinity. This suggests another awesome doodle game. Make a circle. Then, draw the biggest circle you can in that space. Keep doing that and you’ll end up with an Apollonian Gasket (shown in Image gallery). You can also make the circles inside different shapes. You can use triangles, squares, et cetera to fill in the shapes. I filled silhouettes with circles once, but that’s not nearly as fun. In my opinion, it kind of lacks the symmetry of the circles.

Moving on to probably the most fun exercise, triangle stacks. Triangles are practically the birth of geometry. Every shape is made of triangles. A square, a hexagon, a trapezoid. You can draw your triangles separately, but the real fun is in drawing them in long stacks. Draw one triangle. Then draw another triangle on top of it… and so on. You can alternate from side to side, making a straight line, or you can draw them all on one side and then it gets all spiral-y. This also is the one that gives you the most leeway. You may notice that the skinnier a triangle is, the less curved the tower is. So if you want a wobbly stack tower, you can just put a huge “fat”, or obtuse, triangle to bend the balance. Just let your imagination flow. That is the real way to draw art.”