Blog Post #12 – Dancing Euclidean Proofs

I can still recall learning about the golden ratio in high school. What I found most fascinating about it is that it appears in nature quite frequently, and because of that, it is often called the divine proportion. This is one of the reasons I’ve always found mathematics to be an interesting study –
mathematics is all around us. While I was watching the dancing Euclidean proofs video, I couldn’t help but recall the golden ratio, and that math is all around us, even when you don’t realize it. The video shows how we can make geometric shapes with our bodies, once again, something that most people don’t sit around and think about. I was surprised to see that this video was made by high school students, I thought it was quite well done! I think that this video goes to show that much learning can be realized from studying these topics. I’ve expressed this belief in previous blogs, but one thing I found frustrating about learning math is that we often aren’t given context. We are taught trigonometry and calculus but aren’t taught where it came from, or how it is used. High school math curriculums are simply about teaching the theory and how to apply it to different problems. I think an activity like this would allow students to take a step back and think about math beyond simply being a problem and a solution.