The learning guide “Discovering the Art of Mathematics: Dance” lets you, the explorer, investigate connections between mathematical ideas and concepts and dance related ideas and patterns. Moving in symmetry will lead to classifying types of symmetry and Frieze patterns. Dancing Salsa Rueda allows you to explore combinatorial ideas, while Contra Dancing will link with group theory and permutations. You will discover topological ideas while playing with different positions in Partner Salsa Dancing and use Maypole dancing to investigate fundamental domains and create beautiful geometric patterns.

Salsa Rueda and Mathematics

Instead of describing a particular teaching technique, this (shorter) blog will expose you to many ideas that come up for me around teaching a specific topic, salsa rueda, in a math for liberal arts class. I will tell you why I love to include dancing in my math classes and show you videos and student work from my math and dance class. Maybe you also want to give it a try some day?
 
 

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Mathematics of Maypole Dancing

This Fall (2016) the 13 students in my honors mathematical explorations class embarked on the journey of understanding some mathematical ideas behind maypole dancing. In this blog you can find some videos about maypole dancing, student work proving our conjectures and a beautiful writing project by Sarah Dunn about mathematics, running and maypole dancing.
 

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