Blog Post Due 17^th

Dancing Euclidean Proofs!

If I were not taking this course, I would never have known that mathematics can go hand in hand with dance.  It is even more striking to me that we can dance Euclidean proof!  The experience I have with Euclidean was from Number Theory.  To me, that course was dry and full of abstract concepts.  I often had hard time to understand the mathematical logics behind each of the theory or theorem.  When I saw Oliver Byrne’s edition of Euclid, I knew that if I were taught with a pictorial way, I would have understood Number Theory much better that I have now.  Taking one step further, Dr. Gerofsky and her students were able to incorporate dance with these proofs!

If the audience were to read the pictures of Olive Byrne’s edition of Euclid, they would be amazed to see that the actual dance of Carolina and Sam were beautifully and accurately representing the propositions.  The dancers’ goal was to present the most beautiful body movements and to present the proofs most accurately with their bodies.  As Dr. Gerofsky describes “[s]ometimes our bodies felt at odds with the geometric abstractions…and felt like trying to connect two south poles of magnets” (Gerofsky et al., 2019).  The process in designing the dance often times requires “rethinking and repositioning” where they “found the math and the dance actually fell together quite naturally…” (Gerofsky et al., 2019).  And as the dancers used their body parts to represent circles, lines, and points, they finally integrated land into their dance as well.  This decision has freed their body constraints and allowed them to rethink how the proofs could work by adding new elements such as sand, rock, or shells.  This creative and constructing process enables a beautiful combination of mathematics, dance and the nature!

The “dancing proof” has shown a new methodology in studying mathematics - a dynamic, cooperative and visual way.  To study while dancing, we become “the active agents responsible for the making and understanding the representation” (Gerofsky et al., 2019).  I think this innovated way of learning mathematics is applicable in secondary math teaching.  We can design such a project and teach our students in the same way.  I believe the math concepts learned from this “dancing proof” experience will eventually internalize and become part of our students’ permeant knowledge.   

 

Reference

Milner, S. J., Duque, C. A., & Gerofsky, S. (2019). Dancing Euclidean Proofs: Experiments and Observations in Embodied Mathematics Learning and Choreography. In Bridges 2019 Conference Proceedings (pp. 239-246). Tessellations Publishing.