Established | November 17, 2009 (chartered) |
---|---|
Location | 225 Fifth Avenue Manhattan, New York City |
Coordinates | 40°44′38″N73°59′16″W / 40.743804°N 73.987873°W |
Director | Cindy Lawrence |
Public transit access | New York City Subway:
Port Authority Trans-Hudson: HOB-33, JSQ-33 (via HOB), or JSQ-33 to 23rd Street ContentsMTA New York City Bus: M1, M2, M3, M55, M7, M20 |
Website | momath |
The National Museum of Mathematics or MoMath [1] is a mathematics museum in Manhattan, New York City. [2] [3] It opened on December 15, 2012, [4] with over thirty interactive exhibits. [5] [6] The mission of the museum is to "enhance public understanding and perception of mathematics". [7] The museum is known for a special tricycle with square wheels, which operates smoothly on a catenary surface. [8]
In 2006 the Goudreau Museum on Long Island, at the time the only museum in the United States dedicated to mathematics, closed its doors. [9] In response, a group led by founder and former CEO Glen Whitney met to explore the opening of a new museum. They received a charter from the New York State Department of Education in 2009, [7] and raised over 22 million dollars in under four years. [10]
With this funding, a 19,000 square feet (1,800 m2) space was leased in the Goddard Building at 11–13 East 26th Street, located in the Madison Square North Historic District. Despite some opposition to the architectural plans within the local community, [11] permission for construction was granted by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Department of Buildings.
The current board chair is John Overdeck, co-chairman of Two Sigma Investments. [12]
During the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City, the museum closed its physical location on 26th Street. [13] In March 2024, the museum moved to a temporary location at 225 Fifth Avenue. [14] [15] That November, the National Museum of Mathematics announced that it had leased 34,365 square feet (3,192.6 m2) at 635 Avenue of the Americas in Chelsea, Manhattan and would relocate there in 2026. [13] [16]
In October 2016, the exhibit The Insides of Things: The Art of Miguel Berrocal was opened, displaying a collection of puzzle sculptures by Spanish artist Miguel Ortiz Berrocal (1933–2006), donated by the late Samuel Sensiper. Each sculpture can be disassembled into small interlocking pieces, eventually revealing a small piece of jewelry or other surprise. [22]
From May 22 to October 27, 2024, MoMath hosted Mathemalchemy , a special traveling art installation dedicated to a celebration of the intersection of art and mathematics. The exhibit occupied a footprint approximately 20 by 10.5 feet (6.1 by 3.2 m), which extended up to 9.5 feet (2.9 m) in height (in addition, small custom-fabricated tables were arranged around the periphery to protect the more fragile elements). The over 1,000 components of the display incorporated many allusions and models illustrating abstract mathematical concepts, plus humorous mathematical puns and Easter eggs. [23]
On August 2, 2018, MoMath announced the creation of a Distinguished Chair for the Public Dissemination of Mathematics. Princeton professor and Fields Medal winner Manjul Bhargava was named as the first recipient of this position. [24]
Dr. Bhargava was succeeded by Peter Winkler, Dartmouth College Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science as the Distinguished Chair for 2019–20. [25]
In July 2020, Rutgers University professor Alex Kontorovich was announced as the Distinguished Chair for 2020–21. Dr. Kontorovich presented public programs concerning the history of mathematical ideas and the intersection of mathematics and music. [26]
The 2021–22 Distinguished Chair for the Public Dissemination of Mathematics was Steven Strogatz, Cornell University Professor of Applied Mathematics, an award-winning mathematician, author and broadcaster. [27]
The fifth Distinguished Chair, announced in June 2021 is Tim Chartier, a Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Davidson College and a professionally-trained mime. At the same time, MoMath announced that the 2023–24 Distinguished Chair will be Ingrid Daubechies, Professor of Mathematics at Duke University. [28]
Endre Szemerédi is a Hungarian-American mathematician and computer scientist, working in the field of combinatorics and theoretical computer science. He has been the State of New Jersey Professor of computer science at Rutgers University since 1986. He also holds a professor emeritus status at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
The Museum of Science (MoS) is a nature and science museum and indoor zoological establishment located in Science Park, a plot of land in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, spanning the Charles River. Along with over 700 interactive exhibits, the museum features a number of live and interactive presentations throughout the building each day, along with scheduled film showings at the Charles Hayden Planetarium and the Mugar Omni Theater.
Baroness Ingrid Daubechies is a Belgian-American physicist and mathematician. She is best known for her work with wavelets in image compression.
David Harold Blackwell was an American statistician and mathematician who made significant contributions to game theory, probability theory, information theory, and statistics. He is one of the eponyms of the Rao–Blackwell theorem. He was the first African American inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, the first African American full professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the seventh African American to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics. In 2012, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Blackwell the National Medal of Science.
Daina Taimiņa is a Latvian mathematician, retired adjunct associate professor of mathematics at Cornell University, known for developing a way of modeling hyperbolic geometry with crocheted objects.
William Gilbert Strang is an American mathematician known for his contributions to finite element theory, the calculus of variations, wavelet analysis and linear algebra. He has made many contributions to mathematics education, including publishing mathematics textbooks. Strang was the MathWorks Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He taught Linear Algebra, Computational Science, and Engineering, Learning from Data, and his lectures are freely available through MIT OpenCourseWare.
Richard Alfred Tapia is an American mathematician and University Professor at Rice University in Houston, Texas, the university's highest academic title. In 2011, President Obama awarded Tapia the National Medal of Science. He is currently the Maxfield and Oshman Professor of Engineering; Associate Director of Graduate Studies, Office of Research and Graduate Studies; and Director of the Center for Excellence and Equity in Education at Rice University.
Manjul Bhargava is a Canadian-American mathematician. He is the Brandon Fradd, Class of 1983, Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University, the Stieltjes Professor of Number Theory at Leiden University, and also holds Adjunct Professorships at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and the University of Hyderabad. He is known primarily for his contributions to number theory.
The Mathematical Institute is the mathematics department at the University of Oxford in England. It is one of the nine departments of the university's Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division. The institute includes both pure and applied mathematics and is one of the largest mathematics departments in the United Kingdom with about 200 academic staff. It was ranked as the top mathematics department in the UK in the 2021 Research Excellence Framework. Research at the Mathematical Institute covers all branches of mathematical sciences ranging from, for example, algebra, number theory, and geometry to the application of mathematics to a wide range of fields including industry, finance, networks, and the brain. It has more than 850 undergraduates and 550 doctoral or masters students. The institute inhabits a purpose-built building between Somerville College and Green Templeton College on Woodstock Road, next to the Faculty of Philosophy.
George William Hart is an American sculptor and geometer. Before retiring, he was an associate professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University in New York City and then an interdepartmental research professor at Stony Brook University. His work includes both academic and artistic approaches to mathematics.
Arthur T. Benjamin is an American mathematician who specializes in combinatorics. Since 1989, he has been a professor of mathematics at Harvey Mudd College, where he is the Smallwood Family Professor of Mathematics.
Peter Mann Winkler is a research mathematician, author of more than 125 research papers in mathematics and patent holder in a broad range of applications, ranging from cryptography to marine navigation. His research areas include discrete mathematics, theory of computation and probability theory. He is currently a professor of mathematics and computer science at Dartmouth College.
Edward Bruce Burger is an American mathematician and President Emeritus of Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. Previously, he was the Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Mathematics at Williams College, and the Robert Foster Cherry Professor for Great Teaching at Baylor University. He also had been named to a single-year-appointment as vice provost of strategic educational initiatives at Baylor University in February 2011. He currently serves as the president and CEO of St. David's Foundation.
Andrea Louise Bertozzi is an American mathematician. Her research interests are in non-linear partial differential equations and applied mathematics.
Hee Oh is a Korean American mathematician and the Abraham Robinson Professor of Mathematics at Yale University. She made contributions to dynamical systems, discrete subgroups of Lie groups, and their connections to geometry and number theory.
Gaven John MartinFRSNZFASLFAMS is a New Zealand mathematician. He is a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Massey University, the head of the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study, the former president of the New Zealand Mathematical Society, and former editor-in-chief of the New Zealand Journal of Mathematics. He is a former Vice-President of the Royal Society of New Zealand [Mathematical, Physical Sciences Engineering and Technology. His research concerns quasiconformal mappings, regularity theory for partial differential equations, and connections between the theory of discrete groups and low-dimensional topology.
Kenneth Morgan Golden is an American applied mathematician and Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at the University of Utah, where he is also an adjunct professor of Biomedical Engineering. He works on modeling sea ice and its role in Earth’s climate and polar marine ecosystems. Golden has been on nineteen expeditions to study the physics and biology of sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic.
Chaim Goodman-Strauss is an American mathematician who works in convex geometry, especially aperiodic tiling. He retired from the faculty of the University of Arkansas and currently serves as outreach mathematician for the National Museum of Mathematics. He is co-author with John H. Conway and Heidi Burgiel of The Symmetries of Things, a comprehensive book surveying the mathematical theory of patterns.
Mathemalchemy is a traveling art installation dedicated to a celebration of the intersection of art and mathematics. It is a collaborative work led by Duke University mathematician Ingrid Daubechies and fiber artist Dominique Ehrmann. The cross-disciplinary team of 24 people, who collectively built the installation during the calendar years 2020 and 2021, includes artists, mathematicians, and craftspeople who employed a wide variety of materials to illustrate, amuse, and educate the public on the wonders, mystery, and beauty of mathematics. Including the core team of 24, about 70 people contributed in some way to the realization of Mathemalchemy.
Alex V. Kontorovich is an American mathematician who works in the areas of analytic number theory, automorphic forms and representation theory, L-functions, harmonic analysis, and homogeneous dynamics.