DIY mathematical

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Robert Ghattas
Bricologica. Thirty mathematical objects to build with your hands
Sironi publisher 2010, p. 156, € 20.00

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Straws and plastic cups, cards, streamers, rulers, glue, scissors and tape. Forget the calculators, mathematics can we build it, touch it, manipulate it in the form of polyhedra, and origami, snakes, cubes, stars, mobius strip. Thirty objects to build with your hands that make tangible numeric or geometric properties that characterize them. Robert Ghattas, seduced fun-looking recreational mathematics, has invented a new pastime: bricolage mathematician, a fun way to learn the rules a science which we are accustomed to consider abstract.

Simple to build, construction suggested by Ghattas, Canadian and Italian origin of adoption, are beautiful to see and can serve as decorative items, games and arts culinary compositions. Scanning the book are so platonic solids in the unusual role of snacks made ​​of cheese (Emmenthal of a pyramid, with toothpicks to make cubes of sides and vertices), the traditional Chinese game Tangram, which is the composition of geometric designs from seven cards of three different forms, a small book in a thousand folds, a calendar Cubist (in the sense that it is made ​​with two cubes), the infinite scale, with which many children are entertained in the past.

All this to prove that abstract thinking and manual dexterity can get along as the author says in the introduction: "I like to think that this book mathematics and dexterity are inseparable, as are inseparable in a human body and spirit" . The success of the book also has a sleek and simplistic graphics, which relies on a simple symbols that guide the reader-craftsman in the three stages of his work: a block indicates the necessary material, scissors introduce instructions for implementation; a lens indicates the explanatory volume. Yes, because, through the work completed, it is worth asking what we hold in your hands: the glass that we have serrated, reduced in twelve tongues and turned into a wheel represents a group of rotational symmetry.

Why Bricologica is not only a guide for leisure but a real manual (in fact the etymology refers to the hands) that teaches us new things. Cutting, pasting, manipulating, we have the opportunity to hear the stories of scientists, problems remained unsolved, puzzles, demonstrations and theories. A trip to the hard science that probably would have avoided the reader to undertake if he were forced to study formulas and solving exercises. Some teachers we ever thought?