MathCounts


	Mathematical Games with Typography A presentation by Scott Kim for MathCounts May 10, 1996, Washington D.C.

MathCounts is an annual national mathematics competition for junior high school students, sponsored by the National Society of Professional Engineers. For my keynote presentation, I showed a suite of inversions on mathematical themes, including several created just for the event: Moebius (as a Moebius strip), Golomb (spelled using pentaminoes), Harary (as a graph), Pythagoras (as a triangular tessellation), MathCounts (spelled using the ten digits in various orientations).

Note to MathCounts attendees. If you are interested in the program that lets you build shapes out of cubes and look at their three different shadows, enter then click on "Spatial" in Gayle Curtis's site Garden Gate. From there you can FTP BlockBuilder (the program I demoed) for free from Stanford University. It's for Macintosh only, written in HyperCard. A version of BlockBuilder is also available as part of the educational software package VizAbility, which is available both for Macintosh and Windows. Gayle and I were co-authors on both VizAbility and BlockBuilder.

My book Inversions and my computer game Heaven & Earth (for both Mac and PC) are currently out of print. You might try a library or used bookstore. Heaven & Earth includes two games I demonstrated during my talk: Convex Concave (moving cubes around to make illusionary figures) and Figure Ground (moving "sticky" black and white squares around to make shapes). I'm working on getting them back in print this year. If you would like me to notify you when this happens, send me your email or mailing address.

Until then, check out this site for new inversions every week. I also have inversions posters and t-shirts available.

Audience Suggestions

I ended my talk by creating inversions on the spot on words suggested by the MathCount attendees. "Star Wars" was a favorite with many people, but "Spam Wars" won out. Turns out this is a rather easy inversion. Then I tried a harder suggestion: "onomatopoeia".

Here are some of other words for inversions that people suggested. A few words I did just after the talk, and many words people did themselves during the talk. I invite you to try them yourself.

Star Trek, Boise, polynomial, exit, A New Hope, The Empire Strike Back, Return of the Jedi, any MathCounts sponsor, HyperCard, Omni Shoreham, HP, TI, Heaven and Earth. Ben Sauer.

Scorpion, Friday the 13th, USAMO. David Zhang.

Fruitcake, Amadeus, Inversion, Infinity (in an infinity sign).

Wisconsin, Jersey. Eric Engelson (who did both words as inversions)

Nathan Field, Karoline, Garfield

Star Wars, Superman, Lois and Clark. Irene Kim and Megan Wulff. (I drew Star Wars as a rotational inversion, and drew Lois inside Clark after the talk.)

Qbob, Spamsylvania, Sasha, Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. Alexander "Sasha" Schwartz, who scored highest in the competition.

Hyperbola (with the H written as a hyperbola), Parabola (with the bowl of the P written as a parabola; these ideas from Mr. Green, math teacher at Cave City High School), Cube (written on the faces of two cubes), log base 8 of 601 (naturally the same upside down). Vikki Kowalski.

Say No to Dope (repeating chain), Klein Bottle/ Moebius surface. Kathy Mancuso.

Math (hidden in a picture of an umbrella), Jill F. K. hidden inside Lauren. Lauren Weigand, who drew both of these designs.

Harv, Nine, Omni (all done in Moebius symmetry). Matt Garvey, who also created a pictorial tessellation called "Surfer Dude" when he was in fourth grade.

Soccer, Kemosabe, Idaho, France, National, Squared, Adidas, Algebra, Calculus, Star. Matt Francis.

Calculus (180 degree rotation), Rotation (letters at opposite ends of the word are 90 degree rotations of each other. Ken Chu, who did these designs during the talk.

Vertigo, Logarithm/Exponent.

Death Gate. Sam Shapero. (I did this inversion after the talk.)

Escher/Illusion (rotation), Jalapeno/Pepper (reflection), Can You/See It? (glide reflection), Something/Nothing (rotation). Elango Cheran.

Obi--Wan Kenobe/Jedi Master, Calculus, Dioxyribonucleic Acid/DNA, Einstein/Physicist, Death/Birth, Live/Die/ Courage/Cowardice, Marion Barry/Cocaine Addict. David Mermin.

Calculator alphabet using the 7 cells. Neil Vasan.

If you have other suggestions, email me and I'll add them to this list. You can also FTP me images you've done, send me a URL to your web site if you want to show off your own inversions, or ask me to remove your name from this list.