Fifty Years of Mathmagic Land

I finally succumbed to Twitter. I plan to use my twitter account to supplement the blog with bite-sized items. I may sometimes expand those tweets into longer blog postings like today.

My 11-year old daughter talked about using straight lines and angles to improve her mini-golf game. That reminded me of the billiard ball scene in a Donald Duck math movie I saw many times over during my grade school years. Off to YouTube where we watched Donald in Mathmagic Land which coincidentally turns fifty years old this month.

Holds up pretty well after fifty years though the modern music, art, architecture and technology aren't so modern any more. Catch the Turing machine (reel-to-reel computer) near the end.

It was this movie and a Time-Life book on mathematics (which had a really cool chapter on probability) that got me excited by the fun of math which, of course, helped shape my future academic career.

The movie has a scene where Donald tries to open some locked doors that the narrator says represents knowledge yet to be discovered. Cool to think that I have now witnessed many of those door opened, some with my own hands.