Geometry Playground
Opens at the Exploratorium June 25 – September 6, 2010
Then Travels Nationally

The word “geometry” might dredge up  memories of classrooms, textbooks, and trying to calculate the volume of a cube. But what if geometry instead meant climbing inside cool, giant 3D shapes, or watching yourself in a big curved mirror as you try to play hopscotch? It turns out that seeing things, moving things, and fitting things together are all ways of exploring geometry. And since we’re talking Exploratorium, this exhibition is one where geometry is based on action! Sometimes you’ll use your hands, other times your entire body. And always your brain. Geometry Playground, developed by the Exploratorium over the past three years, includes over twenty exhibits and specially commissioned artworks, and is on view from June 25-September 6, 2010. It then travels to St. Paul, San Diego, and to other cities nationally. Geometry Playground, which also includes an eight-part summer film series, is made possible by the National Science Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The exhibition is included in the price of admission to the Exploratorium.

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The Exploratorium’s new Geometry Playground should change the way you think about geometry, letting you touch and play with what for most has been only a textbook subject. And you’ll discover its beauty through such specially commissioned artworks as The Geometron, by John Edmark, where you look into a tapered kaleidoscope to see a live video creating a 120-sided shape.

At Geometry Playground, discover the geometry of motion and how whenever you move your limbs, for example, you trace out a shape in space. Think of a dancer’s forearm, how it traces out a straight line, a curve, or an angle. At Light Traces, use a flashlight to “draw” in the air around yourself, then see your movements manifested as geometric sketches on a large video screen. That’s geometry! At Gyroid Climber, move through a wild mathematical playground climber — a periodic minimal surface — unlike anything you’ve seen before. As you crawl, you’ll discover that the only way to get from one room to another is to leave the structure and enter it all over again.

Or experience the geometry of seeing at a number of different anamorphic mirrors — cylindrical mirrors that change shapes as they reflect. For example, at Distorted Chair, you’ll notice that when you look in the mirror, the distorted chair looks normal, but your body doesn’t! Sit on this marvelously stretched-out seat and try to figure out why the chair becomes normal in the mirror as your body becomes narrow and squished. Turns out there is an invisible geometry to light!

Or play hopscotch on an oozing, curved hopscotch grid before another large cylindrical mirror. As you hop, you’ll feel the difference between the shapes on the floor and those that have straightened out in reflection. Or, at Distorted Drawing, try your hand at how to draw distorted pictures so that they will look normal in the curved mirror. These exhibits, like many in Geometry Playground, force visitors to think three-dimensionally, tapping into our mental geometry – spatial reasoning. Spatial reasoning is essential to a variety of everyday tasks, like fitting an unfamiliar key into a lock, or trying to imitate another person’s dance moves.