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Bending and Stretching Classroom Lessons to Make Math Inspire

At first glance, Ms. Hart’s fascination with mathematics might seem odd and unexpected. She graduated with a degree in music, and she never took a math course in college.

Then, in November, she posted on YouTube a video http://www.youtube.com/user/Vihart#p/u/7/e4MSN6IImpI about doodling in math class, which married a distaste for the way math is taught in school with an exuberant exploration of math as art .

The rapid-fire narration begins, "O.K., let’s say you’re me and you’re in math class, you’re supposed to be learning about exponential functions, but you’re having trouble caring about exponential functions because unfortunately your math class is probably not terribly engaging."

The video never shows her face, just her hands doodling in a notebook. She talks about binary trees, Hercules cutting off the heads of a mythical hydra (each severed neck grows two new heads, which is the essence of a binary tree), and a fractal pattern known as Sierpinski’s Triangle.

Kenneth Chang

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/science/18prof.html?_r=1&hpw

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