What is the Batman Equation?
A graphical way to make math fun and enjoyable
Math is amusing. There’s not a single pinch of doubt about that. If you go into it deeply enough, you uncover those aspects of math that have never been explored before. If you are a student of math, you understand how fascinating it is to understand the laws and theorems, and problems of math and how interesting it is to find their solutions. When you are a teacher of math, you look at the world and the universe through a mathematical lens. You discover many ways to keep your students interested and indulged in mathematics.
In my previous piece about teachers and teaching methodologies, I mentioned how important it is to engage your students in practical learning and make them capable to make connections between mathematical ideas and the real world rather than just lecturing and providing notes.
I came across a similar case that turned out to be a brilliant example of this advice. A teacher who took mathematical teaching to a whole new level, in a way that his students could never turn their backs on mathematical realms.
J. Matthew Register is a full-time mathematics professor at American River College. He was teaching at some art colleges around the Sacramento area a few years back when one of his students posted something online that went viral. He had posted an equation that when plotted graphically gives you an almost perfectly symmetrical batman sign. Matthew states in one of his quora answer that he tries everything he can
“to make math as enjoyable as possible.”
He certainly succeeded in that because after the image went viral on social media, several other mathematicians and mathematics enthusiasts tried to create similar patterns using mathematical equations. Some of those patterns include pokemon, superman, Doraemon, and mickey mouse.
If you want to study the complete deconstruction of the equation and how it was framed, you can study it here.
The idea is to make things as interesting as possible and as enjoyable as possible for your students. If the students find it difficult to understand something or find it boring then there’s certainly a way you can work on your teaching methodologies. Prof. Register is an excellent example of how teaching and learning can be made fun and enjoyable irrespective of the complication of the subject.
You can find plenty of such examples online where equations are framed to graphically construct several images. In fact, there are many applications and software out there that help you frame equations.
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