Numberphile’s “Freaky Dot Patterns” video

Saw this neat tweet from Patrick Honner earlier in the week:

Mind-blowing @numberphile video, "Freaky Dot Patterns", featuring Tadashi Tokieda.https://t.co/02KfPNZqEy#math #mathchat #geomchat

— Patrick Honner (@MrHonner) February 10, 2016

The video itself will blow you away:

I shared it with Dan Anderson yesterday who made a couple of computer versions of patterns from the video:

Moiré #1
Interactive: https://t.co/yTJvx9FLZq @mikeandallie @mrhonner @numberphile https://t.co/8i5EDn9cQN pic.twitter.com/9JGnYnYiyz

— Dan Anderson (@dandersod) February 11, 2016

Here is the Moiré triangle. Interactive: https://t.co/UcRewv7hd3 @mikeandallie @mrhonner @numberphile pic.twitter.com/g9vOxCJ53D

— Dan Anderson (@dandersod) February 11, 2016

Sorry the video quality isn’t so great, but it was fun talking through these patterns with the kids. We started with the square pattern:

Then we moved on to the triangle pattern. It was surprisingly difficult for the kids to understand how to describe the rotations, but eventually they figured it out. I think I’ll revisit a bit more about rotations for a Family Math Project this weekend.

The patterns in the Numberphile video make a great project to talk through with kids. I can’t wait to try a few more ideas from their video.

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