MATH TRAILS

Mary Margaret Shoaf

Henry Pollak
Joel Schneider
 Executive Director, COMAP: Solomon Garfunkel
Production Manager: George Ward
Cover and Design: Daiva Kiliulis
Production: Tim McLean, Pauline Wright

Copyright 2004
by COMAP, Inc.

The Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications (COMAP)

175 Middlesex Turnpike, Suite 3B
Bedford, MA 01730

All rights reserved. The text of this publication, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise,
without prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 0-912843-76-4

Permission for reprinting

A Mathematics Trail Around the City of Melbourne
granted by Doug Clarke.
CONTENTS

Math Trails 1

Part 1: Purposes and Organization of a Math Trail

Introduction 6
Background and History 6
Characteristics of Math Trails 8
Blazing a Trail 10
Organizing a Math Trail Project 14

Part 2: Examples of Math Trails

Recreational Mathematics in the Park 16
Recreational Mathematics Around Town 34
Recreational Mathematics at the Zoo 47
Recreational Mathematics in a Mall 57

Part 3: Mathematics of Several Kinds of Trail Situations

Parking 70
Supermarkets 78
Buildings 82
A Hike in the Country 85
Tilings 88
American Flags 99
Moving Vans 106
Estimation 108

References 112

Appendix: A Mathematics Trail Around the City of Melbourne

MATH TRAILS iii

iv MATH TRAILS
 MATH TRAILS
It was not quite a typical Sunday dinner. Roberts sister Debbie who
was an engineer with a local chemical company had joined the
Johnson familyJean, Robert, and their children Sally and Tom. The
conversation around the table came to the math course in school.
As I see it, said Tom, there are three troubles with math: I dont
like it, none of the rest of you ever liked it, AND its of absolutely no
use. Oh, I dont mean you, Aunt Debbie, he added when he saw the
frown on her face, You like the stuff, I know, and youve told me
before how much it helps you with your work. But it does absolutely
nothing for any of the rest of us except waste our time and make
us miserable.

Youve mentioned this before, Tom, said Debbie, and some of the
other people at the factory have told me about similar sentiments in
their families. Ive been thinking about it, and I want to try
something when we all take our stroll after dinner. Lets see if
anything that reminds us of math shows up as we walk along. Now
it was Toms turn to frown a little. Dont worry, Tom, this wont spoil
our digestionor our walk. Nothing to memorize, no right or wrong
answers, no tests, were just going to keep our eyes open.

I see youve planted your begonias along the edge of the driveway,
Bob, said Debbie. Why did you use this pattern?

Well, the Garden Center sold them by the dozen, so I bought two
dozen, Bob answered. The strip is a little narrow, and six rows of
four each didnt quite fit. Then I tried eight rows of three and that fit,

MATH TRAILS 1
 but it didnt look right. Too regular, looked like a box! But by having
seven rows, alternating three and four plants, it looked a lot better.

I like that pattern too, Dad, Sally chimed in, but Id have liked it
even better if youd started with the 4 instead of the 3. You know,
like the stars on the flag.

Would that have worked? asked Debbie.

Sure, why not, said Sally. 4, 3, 4, 3, 4, 3, 4 instead of 3, 4, 3, 4, 3,

4, 3.

But that takes 25 plants, not 24, Debbie observed. Would

any bigger, smaller, bigger pattern have worked with two
dozen plants?

Enough of this, said Tom, Lets get moving!

Wheres your car, Debbie? wondered Jean. Debbie told her that
there wasnt a parking space in front of the house, and she had left it
around the corner. But theres usually space for three cars in front of
our house. What happened?

Well, you see the two cars parked here. Theres a lot of space
between them, but not enough for another car. Of course, if
they had marked parking spaces like they do downtown, this
wouldnt happen.

But those downtown spaces are angle parking, which sure wouldnt
look right here. And the parking in the public lot isnt parallel either,
its at right angles to the curb.

2 MATH TRAILS
 I had hoped you would bring up all the different possibilities, said
Debbie. Why do you suppose there are so many different patterns
of parking?

As they walked by the Jorgensons, they noticed the spruce in front of

the house. It had been planted just two years ago. It certainly has
grown since it was planted. I wonder how much? They had fun
discussing that question. Bob recalled that it was Toms height when
they first saw it and even though Tom had grown since then, the tree
had grown a lot more. How tall was it now? Jean suggested that Tom
stand next to the tree, and that they measure the two shadows. If
Toms shadow were twice his height, then the trees shadow would be
twice the trees height! They hadnt brought anything to measure
shadows, but they could estimate pretty well. Someone suggested
that you really needed only the ratio of the two shadows! After some
discussion everyone agreed with that. They paced the shadows and
seemed pretty pleased with themselves.

They had no trouble finding more good questions after that. A

motorcycle came roaring byhow fast do you suppose it was going,
and how fast was the dog going that was chasing it? That new front
door at the Browns: The glass above it looked like a semicircle but
was it really? How far apart were the dashed white lines in the
middle of the main road they crossed, and how might someone have
decided on the spacing? Whats the pattern of the spirals on those
pinecones overhanging the sidewalk? The street seemed to go uphill
for a stretch, and they wondered what the grade was. How would
you estimate that? Bob suggested letting a ball roll down, and seeing
how long it took to go 20 paces. They thought this should give them

MATH TRAILS 3
 an idea of the grade. The steeper it was the less time the ball should
take, but they werent exactly sure what to do next to figure it out.

Tom told Aunt Debbie that this had been an interesting walka lot
better than he thought it was going to be! He had been surprised by
all the mathematical ideas that had come up as they strolled through
the neighborhood. But he added that he wouldnt have thought of
any of these by himself! It was Aunt Debbies knack and experience
in seeing math every place she looked that had made the difference.
He didnt think they could ever do anything like this without her.

Debbie replied that what they had done was, in a sense, walk a math
trail with her acting as a trail guide. It was like a nature walk with a
ranger in the nearby state park, where the ranger kept telling them
what to look for and answered their questions. But did she really
have to be there in person? Sally said that she had been on a
different kind of nature walk, one where she picked up a printed
trail guide at the beginning. There were numbered stops on the trail,
and the trail guide pointed out special features at the stops, and trees
and plants to look for along the way. She said it was different from a
group walking with a ranger. On the one hand there was no one to
ask about some unexpected observation, but on the other hand she
could proceed at her own pace and follow up on some animal tracks
she hadnt seen before. Couldnt you have a math trail like that?

Debbie asked them to think about the various questions they had
considered. Suppose you wrote them down in a trail guidewould it
work? Bob said that he would not want to have everybody in a trail
walking group stop, dicuss, and trample all over his begonia bed; but

4 MATH TRAILS
 that you could come to the same question in the public garden
downtown! The steepness of a grade, the height of a tree or building
or statue that stands out, and the geometric shapes that are part of
many structures are permanent and public. You could make them
trail stops and prepare questions that would start discussions about
them. You could also be prepared to look for patterns of parking, or
a dog chasing a motorcycle, or somebodys hat blowing off as you
walk between stops. The trail guide could ask you to keep these
things in mind. The main thing was that they had found a lot of
interesting questions to think about. They were using mathematical
thinking in a carefree non-threatening environment and they were
having fun. It seemed to them that you could do this either with
your own Aunt Debbie or with a trail guide that everybodys Aunt
Debbie had prepared for them.

This book is meant to provide ideas for the Aunt Debbies of this
world and examples of the kinds of questions that they might find,
as well as thoughts about where and how to actually lay out a trail
and organize participation in it. There are three parts: An overall
discussion of the purposes and the organization of a math trail;
examples, with lots of pictures, of trails in various settings; and more
detailed discussion of some of the mathematics that is likely to arise.
Have fun!

MATH TRAILS 5
PART 1 PURPOSES AND ORGANIZATION OF A MATH TRAIL

INTRODUCTION
A mathematics trail is a walk to discover mathematics. A math trail can be
almost anywherea neighborhood, a business district or shopping mall, a
park, a zoo, a library, even a government building. The math trail map or
guide points to places where walkers formulate, discuss, and solve
interesting mathematical problems. Anyone can walk a math trail alone,
with the family, or with another group. Walkers cooperate along the trail as
they talk about the problems. Theres no competition or grading. At the end
of the math trail they have the pleasure of having walked the trail and of
having done some interesting mathematics. Everyone, no matter what age,
gets an I Walked the Math Trail button to wear.

This book is a guide to blazing a math trail. Well review the history of
math trails and discuss their attributes. Well also discuss practical issues of
organization and logistics in setting up and maintaining a math trail. Well
discuss mathematical issues in choosing and describing problems and tasks
along a trail. And well also describe a variety of specific examples of trails
and of problems.

BACKGROUND AND HISTORY

Math trails fit very nicely into the ideas of popularization of mathematics
and of informal mathematics education that have been increasingly
recognized as valuable adjuncts to improving mathematics education in the
schools. The NCTM Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (2000)
and Curriculum Standards (1989) call for recognizing broad characteristics
of mathematics as Communication, Connections, Reasoning, and Problem
Solving. Math trails are a medium to experience mathematics in all of these

6 PART 1 - MATH TRAILS

dimensions. Math trails anticipated the NCTM Standards and Principles.
They exemplify a worldwide collection of projects that aim to popularize
mathematics through out-of-school activities. By providing opportunities
for doing mathematics out of school, these projects extend time spent
thinking about math and math problems. They also tend to connect back
into school. Many trailblazers are school people, and teachers often take
advantage of the existence of trails by including them in their instructional
programs. All of this makes for a stronger mathematics education program
in general (Blane, 1989).

The earliest math trails appeared in England and in Australia. In 1985,

Dudley Blane and his colleagues blazed a trail (Blane and Clarke, 1985;
Blane and Jaworski, 1989, 114116) around the center of Melbourne as a
holiday-week activity for families. The trails mathematical ideas included
investigating a circular pattern of bricks in the pavement (to discover the
invariance of pi), studying the timetables in a train station, looking at the
reflection of a cathedral in a pond (to estimate its height), trying to
estimate the speed of water rushing down a spillway, counting the number
of windows in a wall of a skyscraper, and looking for patterns in the
numbers of post office boxes.

Australian mathematics educators constructed many more trails based on a

variety of themes and venues, including preparing for prospecting in a gold
rush town, acting as an apprentice keeper in a local zoo, and working on
the ship works and sailing boats in a historical nautical village. Each of the
Australian trails had a brochure that contained thought provoking,
mathematically oriented questions. In many cases, the questions had no
single correct answers as such. The tens of thousands of Australians who
walked these trails attested to their popularity. Many walkers returned for a
second round accompanied by their families. Because of the strong demand

MATH TRAILS - PART 1 7

for Blanes Melbourne trail, the organizers maintained it for several months
longer than the planned one week.

Like any good idea, the idea of a math trail has spread and people have
adapted it. Carole Greenes of Boston University (Massachusetts) created a
historical mathematics trail in Boston centered on the Common and the
Public Garden. Unlike Blanes Melbourne trail, walkers on Greenes trail
followed a human guide who knew the historical and mathematical aspects
of the trail and who could give hints and suggestions to walkers who got
stuck on a task or idea. Kay Toliver, an award-winning New York City
schoolteacher, leads her students on walks while guiding them to discover
mathematics in their school neighborhood. Student walkers do not write
their ideas and solutions on paper, but informally discuss their discoveries
on the spot and then take the discussion back to the classroom. Florence
Fasanelli, Fred Rickey, and Richard Torrington developed an elaborate math
trail that takes advantage of The Mall in Washington. It provides an
opportunity for the thousands of people who visit The Mall every year to
include a mathematical dimension to their sightseeing. These successful
math trails show that the idea is robust and malleable enough to meet the
needs and imagination of trailblazers in many different situations.

CHARACTERISTICS OF MATH TRAILS

Well describe here a basic model for a math trail. Of course, we offer the
model for you to adapt to match the interests and needs of you, the
trailblazer, and your walkers.

Math trails are for everyone. Everyone studies (or studied) math in
school. Everyone uses math. Math trail problems should be interesting
and accessible to people at all levels of age and experience. We aim for
the widest possible participation. Trail walkers discuss how to approach

8 PART 1 - MATH TRAILS

 a problem and they compare their thinking. Talking about the
mathematics helps to bring it to life and to build confidence in ones
abilities. Math trails respond to the variety of the walkers with variety in
the math problems, both in level of difficulty and in type of
mathematics. Easier and harder problems blend together or alternate.
Arithmetic, geometry, measurement, estimation, and other mathematical
topics all appear. The aim is for everyone to feel the accomplishment of
contributing to the problem solving. A math trail is not just for math
lovers or A-students!

Math trails are cooperative, not competitive. In the spirit of the NCTM
Curriculum Standards the emphasis is on talking about and doing
mathematics. The purpose of the math trail problems is to bring
attention to the processes for formulating and solving problems, not
to find single correct solutions. While an individual might walk a trail
with pleasure and profit, the orientation of trails is toward families and
other groups.

Math trails are self-directed. Such trails are ready when a walker is
ready. There is no time limit.

Math trails are voluntary. An important characteristic of our model is

that walking a math trail is entirely voluntary. This idea is in keeping
with the general principles of the popularization of mathematics in
general. You can turn off or tune out a television show. There are other
things besides mathematics to see in a museum. Its not likely that
anyone can be forced to solve a puzzle. A popular presentation of
mathematics must first attract and keep its participants. If a particular
bit of mathematics or the setting is not attractive or interesting, it wont
work for a math trail. In particular, a trailblazer has to remember that
the trail is meant primarily for people who dont usually do math

MATH TRAILS - PART 1 9

 consciously, people whose memories of school math may not be all that
positive. Math trails are not made for specialists. What works for a
person who already likes math a lot, may not work for someone who
doesnt like it or for someone who is not confident about doing it.

Math trails are opportunistic. We believe that math is everywhere.

Trailblazers can prove the assertion by taking advantage of their locale:
neighborhood street, business district, parking lot, college campus,
shopping mall, park, zoo, library, grocery store, clothing store, and more.
Any public place that allows safe walking is ripe with math problems for
an imaginative trailblazer.

Math trails are temporary. Places change. Permanent trails require

maintenance and continuing time and energy and, perhaps, miss new
opportunities. Rather than maintain this years trail, blaze a new trail
next summer as a way to bring back satisfied walkers and use the
novelty to attract new walkers.

BLAZING A TRAIL
Trailblazing is straightforward and lots of fun in itself. It can take as much
time and energy as you have available. Our model opts for less rather than
more on the part of the trailblazers. The project should be fun for you as
well as for the trail walkers.

Location. Where do you want to locate a trail: neighborhood street,

business district, parking lot, college campus, shopping mall, park, zoo,
grocery store, clothing store, or some other interesting place? Walk the
venue looking for math problems from which to choose. Collect many
more than you will use, so that you can pick and choose for good
balance among the final lot. Snapshots and sketches will be useful in

10 PART 1 - MATH TRAILS

 your planning, although you will probably make several visits to the site.
Keep notes on your ideas so you can sort out the pictures when they
come back from the developer. Be alert for problems that involve
elements of local culture or history, as well as the physical attributes of
the site. Work with a scale map of the venue, noting the specific location
of each problem. Your stops on the final trail route will probably occur
in a different sequence or route than you used in collecting the ideas.

Length. Walking distance, walking time, and the number of problems all
affect the length of a math trail. One mile will do for many people,
although you might design a two-part trail to give a longer option. Two
hours is the limit of most peoples attention for problem solving, even in
the most attractive locale. Consider including a sit-down break midway
in distance and time. This is a chance for the group to talk about what
theyve been doing, as well as to catch their collective breath. Spacing
consecutive trail stops more than 10 minutes apart risks losing a walkers
attention. The time required at each trail stop depends on the walkers as
well as the problem.

Trail guide. Prepare a scale map of the trail including all appropriate
landmarks and features, as well as clear notations to the trail stops.
Describe the problems for each stop, leaving room for trail walkers to
write, sketch, and record their thinking and solutions. Make note of the
tools that a trail walker might need for each problem. Keep the overall
list simple. Paper, pencil, an eraser, a watch, and a hand calculator are
what you can expect most people to have readily available. Include an
address to encourage trail walkers to send comments to about the trail.
This will be helpful to you in thinking about the success of the trail.
Well provide samples of several trail guides below.

MATH TRAILS - PART 1 11

 Mathematics. Sketch out the math problems that you discover. Organize
them on your site map. Including two or three problems at a trail stop
helps to hold a walkers interest and increases the ratio of math time to
walking time. Posing the problems at different levels and with different
mathematical focuses will help to achieve a good variety in the overall
trail. Dont overemphasize estimation or geometry or arithmetic or any
one topic, especially not arithmetic, which will come up in many of the
problems anyway. Include problems with ideas to follow up at home.
Make the problems independent of one another so that trail walkers will
be encouraged by a fresh problem at each stop, regardless of how well
they understand earlier problems. Aim for problems that are not like the
problems that students are currently solving in school. Novel
mathematics will help demonstrate the value of studying mathematics.
Problems that arise naturally from the situation are best, although
incidental problems are also fun. You will find that blazing a math trail is
itself a good math challenge.

Our emphasis throughout this book is on creating a math trail with a

written trail guide for the use and enjoyment of individuals or groups at
their own pace. We do not expect that you or anyone else will be acting as
leader for an organized walk. However, you may very well choose to act as
leader for a group of trail walkers as part of the process of creating the trail.
They may help you in finding interesting problems and with making the
choice on how detailed and prescripted an individual question in the guide
might be. It is not easy to decide, for example, when to ask the trail
walkers for several different ways of estimating how fast, how high, or how
many, and when to write a series of one-step questions that will lead to the
same result. In Part 2 we have taken the opportunity of describing settings
in a wide variety of ways, from detailed and prescriptive to open-ended to
asking you to consider the situation and choose a formulation. If it sounds

12 PART 1 - MATH TRAILS

at times as if we were leading a group on an unwritten walk, thats part of
the thinking about the trail guide.

The creation of a written trail guide to be followed without a leader also

affects the kind of questions you can ask. You have to ask about features of
the landscape, the architecture, the animals, and the stores that you know
are going to be there for a while! Here is a building structure with lots of
line segments in the design. Its interesting to ask how many different
triangles you can find, especially if they may be mutually overlapping and
inclusive. But if an advertising sign gives just as promising an opportunity,
you have to ask if its likely to be there for a while or is it in danger of
being replaced next week. Estimating the height of a building or statue you
cant climb on can be done in more than one way. Asking the participants
to use shadows wont succeed on a cloudy day, but it is great fun when it
works. Looking for tessellations and deciding what makes them different is
usually occasioned by walls or pavements or sides of buildings, and they
are always present. A pattern of stars on a flag is permanent, but there are
parts of the country where the same pattern in a flowerbed may disappear
seasonally in the park perhaps, but not in the mall!

Such problems are naturals for the stops on your trail. While walking from
place to place on the math trail, other questions and problems may arise.
You can decide if you are walking level or perhaps going uphill or down,
and you can think about this in several different ways. You can look for
special polygons (examples of n-gons with n up to perhaps 12, convex or
otherwise), or special polyhedra (examples with different numbers of faces,
convex or concave), or special curves and surfaces (circles, ellipses, ovals,
spheres, and parts of these). There are also problems that might be fun but
are not predictable: Perhaps special numerical properties of license plates of
passing cars, or the probability of meeting an unusually large number of

MATH TRAILS - PART 1 13

consecutive persons of the same sex coming the other way. A trail guide
could suggest keeping an eye open for such opportunities even though they
dont always occur.

ORGANIZING A MATH TRAIL PROJECT

Any project takes organization and planning. In addition to blazing the
trail, a math trail project will require some supporting work to see that it
functions smoothly.

Trailblazers. An individual might set up a trail, but teamwork is fun and

the result can be stronger for having contributions from several points of
view. Including a math user (engineer, business person, etc.,) can help
prevent a school-like tone to the problems. And including someone on
the team who is not a heavy math user can be a good reality check by
representing the majority of the public you will want to reach.

Sponsorship. Is there a club or other such group that will adopt the
math trail project? Of course, a school group might initiate a project, but
there are many other community groups that could step forward, such as
service clubs, scout troops, fraternal organizations, among others.
Sponsorship might include either the money or a mechanism for raising
the money to cover the costs of the project. The trailblazers will prepare
the master copy of the trail guide. Printing or duplication of the trail
guide is a cost. You might translate the guide into other languages
depending on the make-up of your community. Distributing the trail
guide is a problem to solve. You might consider approaching local
merchants, the library, or some other facility close to the trail. Publicity
will be helpful in alerting the community to the existence of the math
trail and in telling them how to get a trail guide. Sponsors can be helpful
in securing publicity. Consider putting signs in store windows or on

14 PART 1 - MATH TRAILS

 community bulletin boards or an announcement in the local newspaper.
A sponsor could be helpful in case permissions are necessary for entries
into premises or otherwise. In any event, you might alert shops or other
businesses in the vicinity of a trail stop of the likelihood of groups of
people coming by, talking about mathematics or otherwise displaying
unusual mathematical behavior! Even if you have a non-school sponsor,
your local school can be helpful in publicizing the math trail with
students. A sponsor might offer a reward for finishing the trail. A badge
or simple certificate are nice symbols of participation as well as
suggestions that others walk the trail themselves. You will need to
arrange for a place where the successful trail walkers can receive their
badges or certificates.

Evaluation. You and your sponsors will want to know if your trail is a
success. Youll want to agree on how to define success. The best
definition is probably one that is simple. Track the number of trail
guides distributed. Include an address for people to send a note after
walking the trail. Make a few visits to the trail when you might
anticipate a large number of walkers. Observe them and perhaps
ask a few questions to gauge their reactions and to provide you with
some anecdotes. Anything much more elaborate is likely to overburden
the trailblazers.

History. Math trails are ephemeral. Capturing your experience can be

useful to others and interesting to those who think about popularization
of mathematics. Think about sending a brief letter concerning your math
trail and your trail guide to COMAP. Be sure to include your interesting
anecdotes, both from the trailblazers and from the trail walkers.

MATH TRAILS - PART 1 15

PART 2 EXAMPLES OF MATH TRAILS

We give four examples of trails in particular situations: A park playground,

a city, a zoo, and a shopping mall. The playground and the shopping mall
are each a single actual location, the city and the zoo trails are composites
drawn from several locations. For each trail stop you will find one or more
pictures, and then ideas and questions suggested by the pictures. The trail
in the park playground is more specific than the others, in order for you to
see examples of the development from what you see to questions and ideas
to actual items for a trail guide.

RECREATIONAL MATHEMATICS IN THE PARK

Parks are popular places for many people, including family groups. In this
chapter we will take a tour of a local park to blaze a math trail in the park
playground. Well discuss our thinking as we spot opportunities to
highlight some math, identify questions to ask, and note choices to make in
settling on a final guide design. Well also include a draft of the trail guide
for each stop.

THE FIRE ENGINE

Our park has an attractive red
fire engine. Children of all ages
have fun climbing aboard the fire
engine, pretending to be the
driver or one of the firefighters
rushing to a fire across town. The
fire engine certainly is large, but
how large is it? Heres a chance Figure 1.
for walkers to estimate some

16 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

measurements using their hands and feet, although a tape measure would
help move things along more quickly.

Think about the size of the tires, the length of the truck or various pieces,
or the height of the seat from the ground. Walkers could record
measurements on the trail guide in order to compare their results. They
might also try estimating some of the lengths before measuring.

As an extension of this exploration, trail walkers can compare their

numerical results when they divide the height of the tire into its
circumference. While we would not expect everyone to get exactly the
same quotient, we would expect the trailers to obtain similar results. This
is a neat way to let everyone discover that did not just pop out of the
sky! It () really does have a true and valid meaning in life and
mathematics. There will be other opportunities during our visit at the park
to explore .

GUIDE TO STOP 1The Fire Truck

This truck is bigger than most cars on the road, but how big is Name:
it? Even the tires are large. Each of you estimate how long
Tire height:
your hand is. Now use your hand to measure the height of
a tire and then measure the distance around the outside of Circumference:
the tire. Compare your answers. Are they different? Talk Quotient:
about why. Truck length:
Divide the height of the tire into its circumference. Is this Bumper length:
number familiar? Compare your results. Seat height:
How long is the truck? How long is the front bumper? The
drivers seat is high off the road, how high is it? Why is the seat so high? Try estimating the height first
and then measuring. Is it easier to estimate longer or shorter lengths?

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 17

TILING BLOCKS
This gate has a grid of square tiles, light on one side and dark on the other.
The tiles are mounted so that they rotate on a vertical wire. Rotating them
generates a great variety of patterns and that affords a variety of counting
problems. The most direct
problem is to estimate or count
the number of square tiles. A
more complex problem is to
count the number of different
patterns. You might want to
ask exactly what you mean
by different.
Figure 2.

GUIDE TO STOP 2Tile Grid

See how each small square tile rotates independently so that you
can turn either its light face or its dark face to the outside. Count Rows
the number of rows of tiles. Count the number of columns. How Columns
many individual tiles are there in the grid? Tiles
Each time you turn a tile, you change the pattern. One pattern
has all the light faces showing. The opposite pattern has all the 2 x 2 patterns
dark faces showing. There are many, many more patterns mixing
3 x 3 patterns
light and dark tiles.
4 x 4 patterns
Look at the four tiles in the corner that make a 2 x 2 square.
5 x 5 patterns
How many different patterns can you make with them?
Total patterns
How many patterns can you make with a 3 x 3 set of tiles?

How many patterns can you make on the whole board? The number is very large! Think about 4 x 4 and
5 x 5 arrays first and see if you can spot a pattern.

18 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

SHAPES AND NUMBERS BOARD
This panel on the carousel is not
only decorative, but also an
instructive opportunity for very
small children to recognize
numbers and simple shapes. This
can be a prompt for the youngest
of the trail walkers to look for
numbers and shapes along the trail. Figure 3.

GUIDE TO STOP 3Shapes and Numbers How many? How many?

Look at all of the shapes and numbers on the board. 0 7
Name them and trace them with your finger. As you
1 8
walk through the playground today, see if you can
find all of these shapes and numbers. Keep a tally for 2 9
each of the shapes and numbers. At the end of your 3 Square
walk, check the tallies to see which shape you found 4 Triangle
most often and which number you found most often.
5 Rectangle
6 Circle

CHIMES
Chimes have always fascinated
children and adults alike.
Windchimes catch the breeze and
play beautiful musical notes. Other
chimes, such as the brightly colored
panel containing eight chimes
pictured here, need to be struck with
something like a stick in order for us Figure 4.

to hear musical notes.

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 19

 GUIDE TO STOP 4Chimes
What a terrific place to stop and have some fun with musical chimes! Are
all the eight chimes the same length?

Hit each of the chimes starting from the shortest to the longest, left-to-
right. Do all of the chimes make the same sound? Which chime has the
lowest sound? Which has the highest sound? How do you think the length
of the chime and the pitch of the tone are related?

GAME BOARD
Game boards can be found
throughout many playgrounds,
recreational picnic areas, and
zoos. This game board in our
playground is made up of Xs and
Os. Each of the nine faces can
come up either as an X or an O
or a blank. The game board is in
an arrangement of a 3 x 3 grid. Figure 5.

SLIDES
Slides are loads of fun for everyone! We never seem to outgrow the thrill of
coming down a slidethe steeper and faster, the more fun! One of the
things you learn in mathematics has to do with the slopes of lines. We can
combine the fun and thrill of a slide with the concept of the slope of the
slide. Once the walkers are comfortable finding the slope of the first slide,
it is a good idea to have them find other slides or ramps in the playground
and compare their slopes.

20 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

 GUIDE TO STOP 5The Game Board
See how each square face of the game board rotates independently
so that you can turn an X or an O or a blank to the outside. Team 1 Team 2
Game 1
Work with a partner to see how many different ways you can
arrange the Xs and Os on the game board grid with no blanks. How Game 2
is this like Stop 2? Game 3
How many different ways can you arrange the Xs and Os if the nine Game 4
squares were lined up in a row instead of in a grid?

What if you decided that the Xs and Os must alternate? How many different ways can this be done?

Choose teams and play some games of tic-tac-toe.

GUIDE TO STOP 6Straight Slides

Measure and record the height of the slide at its tallest point and at its lowest point. Subtract the lowest
from the highest and record your results in the numerator of the fraction below.

height of tallest point height of lowest point

= ______________ =
distance from tallest point to end of slide

Now measure and record how far it is along the ground from the tallest point of the slide to the end of the
slide. Record this answer in the denominator of the fraction above.

This fraction is called the average slope of the slide.

Divide the first result by the second result.

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 21

Some slides are not perfectly
straight, but rather have a slight
bend toward the end of the slide.
This bend acts as a brake for
children, slowing them down
before they come to the end of
the slide. Once trail walkers are
comfortable finding the slope of
a straight slide, have them tackle Figure 6.

finding the slope of a slide with a

bend in it.

GUIDE TO STOP 6Slides With Bends

Discuss ways of defining the slope of this slide. There might be more than one
suggestion for defining the slope. How close are the different slopes? Why are
there different answers? If you see other slides or ramps, find their slopes
and compare them.

GUIDE TO STOP 6Slides

Time to get
How long does it take to get down each
Walker 1 Walker 2 Walker 3
down each slide
of the different slides you find on the Slide 1
playground? Suppose your friend weighs
Slide 2
more than you. Would she/he get down
the slide faster than you? Record your Slide 3
findings in the following table. Slide 4

22 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

 GUIDE TO STOP 6Slides
Distance from the end of the slide
If you roll a ball down the slide, how far does it land from
Slide 1
the end of the slide?
Slide 2
What do you think affects this distance?
Slide 3
Slide 4

SWINGS
Have you ever noticed how
children run over eagerly to a
swing set once they spot it?
Many times they will also screech
with delight as they run toward
the swings. Adults also enjoy
swinging! There just seems to be
Figure 7.
something relaxing and carefree
about swinging.

GUIDE TO STOP 7Swings

Now walk over and watch the children as they swing. Do some of the children
need to be pushed by someone else in order to go higher? Why? Take turns
swinging with your friends. How would you describe the motion of the
swings? How do you make yourself swing higher? Why does the swing
eventually stop?

Some trail walkers could work the with the following situation using the
motion of the swing or damping.

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 23

 GUIDE TO STOP 7Swings
At this stop along the math trail you are to decide if the motion of the swing or damping is constant. You
will need two friends to help you out with this activity. Have one of your friends sit in the swing. Stand
behind your friend and mark the position in the sand from where you will let the swing go. Another friend
should stand to the side of the swing to mark the distance the swing will travel. Now bring the swing back
to your marked position in the sand and let go. The friend on the side should place marks in the sand to
indicate the distance that the swing travels on each successive swinging motion. After the swing comes to a
stop (or near-stop), repeat the swinging and distance measuring activity again using the same person in
the swing and letting the swing go from the same position. Repeat once more and see if you can make a
conjecture about your observations.

GUIDE TO STOP 7Swings

Now explore another activity at the swings. You will need a stopwatch or a watch with a second hand, and
two friends for this exploration. Do you remember what a period is? It is the time it takes for one back-
and-forth motion of the swing. Have a friend sit in one of the swings. Stand behind your friend and bring
the swing back and start your friend going in the swing. Have another friend time 10 back-and-forth
swings and divide that time by 10. Do this
several times giving your friend a different Time for 10 back - and - forth swings
10
amount of push on each trial. Does this affect
Trial 1
the period?
Trial 2
Repeat the whole process using different
Trial 3
distances from which to start the swing. Does this
affect the period? Trial 4

GUIDE TO STOP 7Swings Time for 10 back - and - forth swings

Find some other swings in the playground with 10

different length chains. Try the same experiment Swing 1

using these swings and see if the length of the Swing 2
chain affects the period of the swing. Swing 3
Swing 4

24 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

COUNTING THE LEGS OF A CATERPILLAR
One of the best parts about a
math trail is that there is always
some mathematics that everyone
can dono matter how young
they may be. Playground
designers will often include
opportunities for younger
children to try out their skills Figure 8.
at counting.

GUIDE TO STOP 8Counting the Legs of a Caterpillar

Count the number of legs on the left. How many are there? _____________

Count the number of legs on the right. How many are there? ____________

How do you tell the number of legs on the right without actually counting them?____________

THE SNACK BAR

After several stops on the math trail, walkers should be hungry and thirsty!
This provides an excellent opportunity for some mental arithmetic.

FOOD DRINKS MISC. ITEMS

SODA COFFEE TEA
HAMBURGER............2.50 SM 1.00 MED 1.50 LG 2.00 SUPER PRETZELS......1.75
FRESH SQUEEZED
CHEESEBURGER.......2.75 LEMONADE SM 1.75 LG 2.00 PEANUTS...................1.00
FRENCH FRIES.........1.25 SOUVENIR CUPW/COKE 2.50 POPCORN...................1.50
CATFISH TRAY..........5.25 SOUVENIR CUPW/LEMONADE 2.95 CHIPS......................... .85
GRILLED CHEESE.....2.00 ORANGE JUICE 1.50 CRACKERS.................. .85
NACHO n CHEESE....2.50 SNOWCONES CHERRY
GRAPE 1.50 CANDY......................... .85
BURRITOS.................1.75 ICE CREAM CONES 1.50 COTTON CANDY.........2.50
VANILLA
HOT DOGS.................1.75 SUNDAES CHOCOLATE 1.95 SNOWCONE &
ICE CREAM MIX.........2.25 Figure 9.
CORN DOGS...............1.75 FLOATS STRAWBERRY
PINEAPPLE
CHOCOLATE

CHICKEN SANDWICH......3.25 SM 1.75 MED 2.00 LG 2.50

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 25

 GUIDE TO STOP 9The Snack Bar
Suppose you have $6.00 and you want to buy a drink and a snack. Using the menu on page 25, what are
three possible combinations of drink and snack that you could buy? But wait! Is there any sales tax on the
food? Estimate the sales tax. Do you have enough money to pay for your food? Record your choices and
the total for each in the table below.

Food selection Cost Estimated tax Estimated total cost Estimated change
Combination 1
Combination 2
Combination 3

A clerk at the snack bar earns $5.50 per hour. How many hours must the clerk work to earn $75.00
before taxes?

THE TRAIN STATION

Many playgrounds and
recreational parks offer trains to
ride around the area. Children
and adults alike enjoy these train
rides. If the playground you are
using for a math trail offers train
rides, it is an excellent
Figure 10.
opportunity to enjoy some
mathematics along with a pleasant
trip around the playground.

26 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

 GUIDE TO STOP 10The Train Ride
Suppose the stationmaster tells you that the
average speed of the train is 5 mph. Time
the length for one complete ride on the
train. About how long is the train track?

Suppose the train stops in the station for 5

minutes before departing for the next tour
of the park. What is the probability that the
train will be in the station when you arrive?
If the train is gone when you arrive, what is
Figure 11.
the probability that you will wait less than 5
minutes for the next train?

Now find the stationmaster and ask how long the train rests at the train stop before taking off on another
trip and the average speed of the train. Answer each of the questions in the previous paragraph for your
train ride.

CIRCLES
As you plan your math trail at
the playground keep an eye out
for circles. There could be circles
within game boards, as edging
around a circular garden within
the playground, or as part of the
construction of the playground
Figure 12.
equipment. Circles are the place
to look for .

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 27

 GUIDE TO STOP 11Circles Circumference Diameter Circumference
As you walk around the playground of circle of circle Diameter

watch for circles. Recall from the stop at Circle 1

the fire truck your estimate of the length
Circle 2
of your hand. When you find a circle,
use your hand to measure its Circle 3
circumference and diameter. Record your Circle 4
results in the table to the right. Circle 5
As you come upon other circles during Circle 6
your math trail adventure, find the
circumference and diameter of each and record the measurements in the table. Then find the ratio of each
circles circumference divided by its diameter and record this result in the table.

Divide the circumference of each circle by its diameter. Do you see a pattern? Where did similar questions
come up before on the walk? Compare the ratios of circumference divided by diameter from the fire truck
to the ratios you have just obtained. You observed then that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its
diameter is a constant! You may recall that this number is called pi and is written as . It is approximately
equal to 3.14.

GUIDE TO STOP 11Circles

Now that we have found the circumferences and diameters of various circles as well as the ratio of the
circumference to the diameter for each circle, lets find the area of each circle. Use the formula:

Area of a circle = (radius)2, where radius = 1 diameter

2

Area of a circle = (radius)2, where radius = 1

diameter
2

Circle 1
Circle 2
Circle 3
Circle 4
Circle 5
Circle 6

28 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

 GUIDE TO STOP 11Circles
See if you can find a circle within another circle with the same center. You may recall that these are called
concentric circles.

Find the area of each of the two circles and record your results in the table below.

What is the probability that the coin will land in the smaller, inner circle?

First set of circles Second set of circles Third set of circles

Area of smaller
circle (A)
Area of larger
circle (B)
BA
# of times coin
landed in
smaller circle
# of times coin
landed in
larger circle
Probability that
coin lands in
smaller circle

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 29

THE JUMPING POLE
Some playgrounds have a long, round
pole that is held up by supports and
is parallel to the ground. Children
call it a jumping pole or, perhaps, a
snake. It is different-looking from
Figure 13.
much of the other play equipment on
the playground and children sometimes need to watch other children play
with it before they get the knack of playing on it themselves. Two children
can sit on the snake and push upward with their feet as they are bouncing
up and down. A third, or perhaps a fourth, child can also get on each end
of the snake and push up and down. As one or more children sit on the
snake and friends push up and down on the ends a wavy, up-and-down
movement occurs. It always looks like so much fun and children certainly
love to play on it!

GUIDE TO STOP 12The Jumping Pole

Now lets head over to the jumping pole for some fun. Sit on the jumping pole and push upward with your
feet. See how you go up and down as the snake moves in a wavy type motion. Now have a friend stand at
one end of the pole and push up and down. Describe the ride when your friend gives the pole just a little
push. What happens if your friend gives the end a harder push? How does the distance you travel up and
down depend on how your friend pushes on the end of the pole? Now have a taller or heavier friend take
your place on the pole and you do the pushing at one end of the pole. How does this affect the motion of
the pole? See what happens to the poles up-and-down motion if two people get on the pole and two more
do the pushing. What happens if the two people doing the pushing push down on the pole at the same
time? Try the same thing, but this time push one end down and the other end up. How does this action
affect the motion of the pole?

Time to try something different with the jumping pole. Have everyone get off. Let one person push down
hard on one end of the pole to start the wavy motion. What is the distance between the two high points of
the waves?

Have a person stand at each end of the pole. Then have each person push down on their end of the pole
at the same time. What happens to each wave?

30 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

LADDERS OF DIFFERENT SHAPES
It is also fun to look for ladders
of different designs and shapes
on the math trail. Ladders do not
always go straight up-and-down.
Some can be curved and each
ladder could have a different
angle of elevation.
Figure 14.

GUIDE TO STOP 13Ladders Of Different Shapes

Describe in your own words the shape of this unusual ladder. Is it possible that this ladder is part of a
circle? How would you decide if it is really part of a circle or not? Now look at the rungs of the ladder. Are
they pieces of circles? Describe how you went about making your decision.

Math trails are a truly fun

activity for the entire family!
One particular family of
trailblazers includes everyone in
the activityeven the familys
Labradors! Penny and Maggie
first pose for their picture at the
end of the playground slide. That Figure 15.

being taken care of, they get down to the business of estimating the slope
of the slide by taking several trips up and down the slide to get a birds-eye
view from all angles!

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 31

 They compare notes
before they announce
their estimated slope of
the slide. Maggie prefers
to check the slope
estimate by actually
coming down the slide
while her mother, Penny,
opts for the stairway!
Figure 16. Figure 17.

SOME REFLECTIONS FOR THE TRAILBLAZER

You have just finished your first playground math trail! Just look at all the
mathematics you found around you in the playground! Now that you are a
true Math Trailer, can you find even more mathematics in your playground?

As the creator of the math trail guide, you can judge how much detail your
trail walkers would want to put into each stop. Take a moment to consider
three playground items that are almost certain to be part of any playground:
a seesaw, a swing, and a slide.

With a seesaw, trail walkers can consider the question of what makes it
balancedor unbalanced! Before anyone sits on the seesaw, it is probably
more or less in balance. If two children of equal weight sit at an equal
distance from the point of balance (the fulcrum), the seesaw will stay in
balance. If children of unequal weight sit on opposite sides of it, the
heavier child must sit closer to the fulcrum in order for the seesaw to be
balanced. A good mathematics question to ask here would be How much
closer? If child A weighs 40 pounds and child B weighs 80 pounds, should
child A sit twice as far from the fulcrum as child B? Some of your trail
walkers may come to that conclusion right away. However, it might be fun

32 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

for them to consider this question in a little more detail. Why is there a
problem? Because the seesaw itself has weight and often, for reasons of
strength, is actually pretty heavy. Say each half of the board itself weighs 50
pounds. What is the moment on the left side of the board? You may want to
remind your trail walkers that moment is weight times distance to the
fulcrum. You can think of the 50 pounds of board as being concentrated at
the midpoint on the left, and the distance is the distance from that
midpoint to the fulcrum. On the right side you have another 50 pounds
concentrated at the midpoint of the right part of the board. This means that
the moments are equal. Add the moment of the left side to the moment of
the child sitting on the left end of the seesaw and then add the moment of
the right side to the moment of the child sitting on the right end of the
seesaw. Now lets say that the whole system, board plus children, is in
balance. So you set the two sums equal to each other. Then the moments
due to the board itself are equal, and when you subtract them, the
moments of the children by themselves have to balance! So it works after
all! Did we worry you for just a minute?

On the swings you can discover that, unlike the seesaw, the weights of the
children dont matter! Thats quite a surprise! The period of the oscillation
doesnt depend on the weight of the childonly the push needed to make
her start swinging does! Secondly, the period doesnt seem to depend on the
initial displacement eitherand you probably dont want to get into the
mathematics of thatbut the walkers can perhaps explore if a swing at the
end of a longer rope has a longer period. How much longer? Any guesses
on that?

A slide may be trickier because the friction between the slide and the
person, or favorite pet, going down has so much to do with how long it
takes to get to the end. But you might send balls of different sizes and

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 33

weights down the slide and see that the time it takes for the balls to get to
the end doesnt depend on the weight of the ball. Also it may not differ that
much from a child, or a pooch, as long as they have the confidence to let
go and not try to brake. How far from the end of the slide does the ball or
the child land on the ground? What does that depend on? Is it how heavy
the child is, how far the upper end of the slide is from the ground, or how
far the lower end is off the ground? How long did it take to get from the
top of the slide to the ground? What does this time depend on? Some slides
dont go straight down, but may spiral a bit. As long as there is not a lot of
friction, what effect would such twisting have?

RECREATIONAL MATHEMATICS AROUND TOWN

Most of the time when we walk around town doing errands and exploring
new stores we neglect to see the mathematics surrounding us. Villages,
towns, small cities, and neighborhoods in larger cities all offer wonderful
opportunities for trail walkers to have fun with mathematics! We illustrate
the possibilities with samples from Toronto, Ontario; Waco, Texas; Paris,
France; New York City, New York; and Summit, New Jersey. In each
instance, well look at a variety of mathematical questions that are inherent
in the setting. Aside from working out these possibilities, a trailblazer will
need to pick and choose which questions to use in order to achieve a trail
that balances interest, time, and mathematics.

THE FOUNTAIN IN A PARK IN TORONTO, ONTARIO

Many communities feature lovely gardens and fountains. Heres a fountain
in Toronto, Canada. Geometry and measurement play obvious roles in the
design and layout of both the structural elements and the garden plantings.
In this case, symmetry, tessellations, patterns in the paving stones, and

34 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

comparisons among the
dimensions are all open to
discussion. The pool of this
fountain looks like a
rectangle with a quarter
circle cut out of each corner.
Shrubs form a border along
the edges of the pool,
Figure 18.
perhaps to encourage people
to keep their distance from the water. Altogether the esthetic impression of
the fountain, pool, and plantings is attractive and pleasing because of the
geometry inherent in the design.

ACTIVITIES
Identify the geometric shapes in this structure.

Estimate the number of shrubs planted around the fountain. How does
this number compare with the perimeter of the fountain?

Assuming that the bottom of the fountain is level with the ground,
estimate the depth of the pool and then estimate the number of gallons
of water that the fountain can hold.

ACTIVITIES
Estimate the perimeter of the
darker gray brick rectangle.

How does this perimeter

compare with the perimeter
of the pool?
Figure 19.

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 35

The brick mason laid an interesting pattern of bricks at each corner of the
fountain and this contributes to the artwork. The darker gray bricks add a
finishing touch that defines the rectangle enclosing the structure.

INCIDENTAL SCULPTURE
Many cities and towns have sculptures or statues in various places about
the community. These might be used to inform passersby about some local
history or simply to add a pleasant and charming atmosphere. Some cities,
like Chicago, Illinois, have used non-permanent sculpture exhibits
throughout the town and actually created a trail for automobiles to follow
in order to see the changing exhibits. Waco, Texas, has used this idea of
non-permanent sculptures and created a traveling sculpture that appears
in different parts of town on an unannounced schedule. Passersby never
know what part of town the sculpture will appear in the next week! If it
were stationary, you might put in the center of town or as near to the
center as possible. What do you mean by center? The trail walkers might
enjoy this discussion. If you have a region shaped something like an S, no
matter if it is irregular, you can think of two points in it as far apart as
possible. The line segment joining them would be a diameter of S, and its
midpoint the center of the shape. It would have the property that the
maximum distance from anywhere in the region to that point would be as
small as the choice of point could make it.

Sculptured cows sitting so quietly

and peacefully on the town green
are always eye catchers,
particularly for younger children.
All of the cows in Figure 20 are
lying down on the grass and
facing different directions.
Figure 20.

36 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

 ACTIVITIES
Decide if the cows are solid structures or if they are hollow.

How did you come to your decision?

Are the cows life-sized or smaller or larger than in real life?

Are all the sculptures the same and just placed differently on
the grass or is each individual cow truly different from each of the
other cows?

If your exhibit traveled to two locations, you can imagine dividing the
region into two pieces, each with a center, and making the maximum
distance to the center of each piece as small as possible. And so on for
more locations.

STREET INCLINES
Have you ever walked along a street that sloped down or sloped up? Of
course you have! Very few towns are built on flat land and that means the
streets rise and fall. Even so, the buildings along the streets have floors that
are level and walls that are vertical. Architects compensate for the slope of a
street. Another interesting observation on a street that goes downhill or
uphill has to do with perspective.

ACTIVITIES
Does the street slope to the right or to the left?

Stand in the middle of the sidewalk and look down the sidewalk. What
do you notice about the width of the sidewalk as you look farther and
farther down the sidewalk?

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 37

 Now turn around and look up the sidewalk. Does the same thing
happen to the width of the sidewalk as before when you were looking
down the street?

GEOMETRIC SHAPES WITHIN BUILDINGS

Architects use geometric shapes
and combinations of geometric
shapes to enhance new
buildings and additions to older
buildings. If you were to travel
to Europe, you would find a
beautiful example of this in the
newest addition to the Louvre
Figure 21.
Museum in Paris, France.

Many people call this new addition the Pyramid, because the glass structure
has a pyramid shape. The water fountains are also in the shape of a triangle.

ACTIVITIES
What shape is the base of this pyramid?

What is the name for a pyramid with a base shaped like this one?

Do all pyramids have the same shape base?

What shape is one of the faces of the pyramid?

What shape is each panel of glass?

Look for other geometric shapes within the face itself.

Is the fountain triangle equilateral, isosceles, or scalene?

38 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

 ACTIVITY
Find as many geometric
shapes as you can.

This is the view inside the

Louvre directly beneath the
Pyramid. This glass structure,
too, consists of different
Figure 22.
geometric shapes.

TILINGS
Sidewalks, road- or pathways, and floor tiling can contain all kinds of
interesting and beautiful mathematics. The foyers of hotels and public
buildings are wonderful places to have trail walkers look for geometric
shapes. Many of these floor tilings are large and colorfulmeant to catch
the publics eye not only through the contrasting colors and the use of
different geometric shapes, but also by setting the design into the white
floor tiles with a different angle. You can guide them in seeing a circle
inscribed within a square.

ACTIVITIES
Devise a method to
determine if the round
shape in the center of this
tiling is a circle and if the
shape surrounding it is a
square.

Identify the geometric Figure 23.

shapes in this floor tiling.

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 39

 Estimate the area of the square and use that estimate to help estimate
the area of the inscribed circle.

Estimate the area of the entire tiling.

The second picture shows a tiling design that appears in a sidewalk in the
downtown area of a small town, Summit, New Jersey. Trail walkers will
notice that the pattern repeats itself.

ACTIVITIES
What two geometric shapes
are used over and over to
make the sidewalk?

Were these two shapes laid

down in a particular order?
Figure 24.

Is it necessary for the order of

tiles to be constant so that the pattern continually repeats itself?

This tiling, with two octagons and a square meeting at each vertex
(mathematically referred to as an (4,8,8) tiling), is an example of what is
called a semi-regular tiling. There are eleven of these tilings. They occur in
so many math trails contexts that we have a section devoted to deriving
and discussing them on pp. 8899 of this book. The derivation is in a very
leisurely and elementary fashion, and as a trailblazer you may be able to
adapt parts of it when the occasion arises.

The trail walker may want to discuss the (4,8,8) tiling further. It looks as if
the octagons occupy most of the area being tiled. How much is most? If
the square has unit side so that its area is 1, what is the area of the
octagon? Trail walkers may first estimate it by saying Well, it looks like it

40 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

would hold four of five of those little squares. They may come up with
various ways of actually computing the area: One nice way to do it is to
imagine filling out the octagon into a square by adding four little isosceles
right triangles in the corners. The hypotenuse of such a triangle is 1, its
1
side is 1/ 2 , so that its area is 4 . The side of the octagon augmented to
be a square is then 1 + 2 , so that its area is (1 + 2 )2. The area of the
original, unaugmented, octagon is then (1 + 2 )2 1 = 2 + 2 2 , or
about 4.8.

This might be taken a bit further. Does this mean that throughout an entire
tiling, the ratio of area covered by octagons to area covered by squares is
about 4.8 to 1? That looks reasonable, but how would you be sure? (This
wouldnt be true in every tiling. If you look at Figure 72, a (3,3,4,3,4) tiling,
found on p. 93, a triangle has slightly less than half the area of a square,
but the overall impression is of more area covered by triangles that by
squares!) One way to look at this is to imagine making a strange new
polygoncall it a rattleby combining a square with the octagon to its
immediate right. You can then imagine the plane tiled with rattles. Since
each rattle is 4.8 to 1 octagon, so is the whole plane! (In order to do this
trick in Figure 25, you would have to attach two triangles to each square!)

Another way to estimate the relative area of the square and the octagon is
to toss some small objects like pennies or pebbles onto the pattern and
count how many land in a square and how many land in an octagon. What
if a penny crosses an edge? Then you count where the center of the coin
would be. The trail walker would obtain a so-called Monte Carlo estimate
of the relative area. This method of estimating areas of irregular-shaped
regions relies on the role of chance or random processes and, thus, was
named after the European city famous for its casinos.

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 41

Another interesting activity with tilings is to think about all the motions of
the plane that would take the tiling onto itself. Can you move any vertex
onto any other in such a way that the tiling lands exactly on itself? Does
the fact that all vertices look alike imply that you can always do this?

Some tilings use only one geometric shape. Have your trail walkers use
their imagination to picture a sidewalk repeating only one geometric shape
other than a square or a rectangle. Is it possible to repeat the pattern
continuously to construct the sidewalk? (Hint: Think about the edges of
the sidewalk and those places where the sidewalk meets another sidewalk,
roadway, or simply ends.)

ACTIVITY
What geometric shape was
used for the tiling in this
sidewalk?

Figure 25.

The fourth example of a

sidewalk tiling is very
interesting! Quite different from
the previous examples your trail
walkers may have encountered!
How do you suppose the brick
masons planned this walkway?
Figure 26.

42 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

 ACTIVITY
Think of yourself as the brick mason who laid this walk. What type of
rules do you think he/she would have needed to follow in order for the
pattern to fit together without any gaps? Answer: They are probably
aesthetic, not mathematical rules.

Examples of beautiful tilings can be found everywhere. Driveways and

roadways in front of public and private buildings such as museums and
hotels are often laid in patterns.

A beautiful example of a tiling used on a roadway outside a museum is

shown in the next picture. Notice the graceful arcs made by the bricks!
These arcs make a fan-like pattern that repeats itself. Is it possible that the
arc is really part of a circle? Have the group decide if this is true or false.

ACTIVITY
These graceful arcs made out
of bricks are in a fan-like
pattern that repeats itself.
Work with your group to
decide if this arc is really
part of a circle. Figure 27.

Here is another roadway pattern using arcs. At first glance, this tiling might
appear to be the same pattern that the trail walkers have examined in other
roadways but just in a different colored brick. Encourage the group to
decide amongst themselves if the roadway tilings are the same pattern or
not. Then have the trail walkers make a list of those characteristics that the
tilings have in common and those in which they are different.

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 43

 ACTIVITIES
Make a list of those
characteristics that the tilings
using arcs have in common.

Make a second list of those

characteristics that the tilings
do not have in common.
Figure 28.

Public buildings and hotels, in particular, use sculptures to enhance the

foyers. The title of this sculpture in the lobby of a large hotel is Parabola.
Some of your trail walkers would easily understand why the artist chose the
title Parabola for this particular sculpture. Walking around the Parabola will
give the walkers an opportunity to see the different three-dimensional effects
of the glass and the different angles at which the glass panels are positioned.

Figure 29. Figure 30. Figure 31.

44 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

 ACTIVITIES
Find the lines or planes of symmetry for the Parabola sculpture.

It is possible that there is more than one line of symmetry. As you walk
around the sculpture point out possible lines or planes of symmetry for
others in your group. Then together discuss each observation and decide
which are lines of symmetry and which are not.

Companies use billboards to attract the attention of passersby and

encourage them to use and buy their products and services. The bid for
consumer dollars has led many advertisers to use flashier, more colorful,
and cleverer billboards. This particular example of a billboard advertises
three different productsnot just one! But how is this done? Have trail
walkers spot an example of a rotating billboard to help them see how this
can happen. The long, narrow and flat, vertical slats of many
moving/changing billboards have a triangular cross section making it
possible to advertise three different products on one board. A motor
connected to this billboard changes the billboards face about every seven
seconds. It would be interesting to investigate the ideal time for a moving
billboard to stay on each face in order for a passerby to read and reflect on
all three faces of the billboard.

Figure 32. Figure 33.

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 45

 ACTIVITIES
What is the geometric shape of a cross section of each of the vertical
slats used in the billboard?

How many seconds does it take for all three advertisements on the
billboard to be seen by the passersby?

Is this enough time? What would be the ideal time that you would
recommend for each message to be viewed and read by passersby?

As trail walkers go about the town have them look for circular shapes used
in different ways. One beautiful example of a circle would be the wheels of
an antique gold carriage on display at The Mews in London.

ACTIVITIES
How many spokes are radiating out
from the center of the wheel?

The spokes break the circle into how

many sections?

If the sections are approximately

equal in size, how many degrees are
in each section of the circle?
Figure 34.

Circles add grace and elegance to

doorways and windows. Encourage
the group to discuss ways to determine
if they are, indeed, circles or parts
of circles.

Figure 35.

46 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

 ACTIVITY
As you walk about town look for
examples of circles. Keep a log of the
circles that you find, where they were
on your walk, and their different uses.

Figure 36.

RECREATIONAL MATHEMATICS AT THE ZOO

One of the most exciting and fun math trails can be found by walking
through a zoo. Since many cities and towns of all sizes have a zoo, it is a
neat place to have fun while at the same time seeing all of the different
animals and exploring some interesting mathematics.

Many zoos have elaborate entrances to catch the attention of passersby. The
magnificent entrance gate to the Berlin Zoo in Germany is one of the
prettiest in the world. Before paying the admission fee to your zoo math
trail, walkers can take turns standing by one of the elephants or other
statues that might be a part of the entrance gate. They can estimate the
height of the statue by comparing its height to their own. Geometric shapes
are used within the design of an entrance
gate and throughout the zoo. Finding and
naming the different shapes is a
particularly fun activity for the younger
members of your group who might be just
learning the basic geometric shapes. They
love to race about the zoo to see if they can
find a new shape and be the first to point it
out to other trail walkers. Other examples
of geometry such as angles can be found
Figure 37.
throughout the zoo.

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 47

 ACTIVITIES
Use one persons known height as a gauge to help you estimate the
height of the entrance gate.

Find as many geometric shapes as possible within the entrance gate area.
As you continue your walk through the zoo, locate other geometric
shapes and note how they are used.

The very top of the Berlin Zoo gate appears to be part of a circle. How
much of a circle do you think is used to form the top of the gate?

The large lantern is suspended above the entrance gate by three heavy
wires forming two angles. Use them to initiate a discussion of the
symmetries of the gate. In fact, the center wire, if extended, is a line of
__________________ for the entire gate.

Explore different ways to estimate the size of each of the two angles.
What would be the measure of the large angle? Test your method of
estimating these angles to see if it would work for all angles? As a group
explore different ways to estimate an angle (see p. 109).

Encourage the trail walkers to keep a keen eye as they walk through the
zoo. Mathematics can jump out from all directions! Trail walkers can
even find mathematics surrounding a little girl washing her hands at a
water fountain. The water flows from the mouth of the bear into a
container on the ground. The rim of the reservoir is not a circle, so the
reservoir cannot be half of a sphere. Walkers may need to review their
geometric shapes to help them determine the name for the shape of the rim
of the reservoir and then find the name for the three-dimensional figure
that has this shape.

48 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

 ACTIVITIES
What is the shape of the water
reservoir?

Estimate how many minutes it would

take to fill the reservoir. Then time the
filling to see how close you came to the
actual number of minutes.

Another interesting place to look for

mathematics within a zoo is a waterfall.
Encourage trail walkers to think of
different ways to estimate how fast the
Figure 38.
water is flowing.

ACTIVITIES
Discuss different ways to estimate
how fast the water is flowing.

How much water is flowing?

Figure 39.

ACTIVITIES
Los Ange
les Zoo
If the Los Angeles Zoo is 9682 kilometers 9682 km

away from the Berlin Zoo, how many

ELEFANTEN NACHTTIER
miles would that be? LOWEN
AFFEN

Of the many different ways to travel from TIERKIN

DER SEELOWEN
ZOO
ZOO
Berlin to Los Angeles, which one do you PANDA
RESTAURANT

TOILETTEN
think is 9682 kilometers? FLUSSPF
ERD

Figure 40.

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 49

The walkways within many zoos have figures of animals drawn on them or
embedded in tiles. There are many interesting questions for walkers to
consider about the size of the animals. To estimate the height of the giraffe
or rhinoceros or another animal, one walker could lie down on the tiles
beside the animal and the other walkers could estimate how much taller or
shorter the animal is compared to that persons height.

ACTIVITIES
Estimate the number of white tiles it
takes to outline the giraffe. Then
estimate the number of gray tiles
inside the giraffe.

Estimate the number of white tiles it

takes to outline the rhinoceros. Then
estimate the number of gray tiles
inside the rhinoceros.
Figure 41.

Estimate the height of the giraffe and

the rhinoceros. One way to do this
is to have one of the trail walkers
lie down on the tiles beside the
animal and then the other walkers
can estimate how much taller or
shorter the animal is compared to
their friends height. Another way
would be to pace off the height of Figure 42.

each animal.

Nearly all zoos, no matter their size, have giraffes because they are a
favorite of children and adults alike! Children love to try to guess the

50 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

height of each of the giraffes or compare the heights of a male giraffe to a
female giraffe or the height of a baby giraffe to its mother. Encourage trail
walkers to devise methods to estimate the heights of the different giraffes.
This particular giraffe is standing next to a large pillar with gray horizontal
lines. Walkers could estimate which gray horizontal line the giraffe would
come closest to if she were standing up straight.

ACTIVITY
Estimate the height of the giraffe.
If the group comes up with more
than one way, compare the height
results to see if they are
approximately the same.
Figure 43.

This would also provide an excellent opportunity for members of the group
to talk about proportionality. Encourage trail walkers to think about the
proportionality of the giraffe or another animal in comparison with its
surroundings. Have them also explain how grid paper helps them to estimate
the proportionality of the animals they are drawing.

ACTIVITIES
Use grid paper to draw a scaled picture of the giraffe.

As each of you works on your drawing, talk to each other and explain
how you are estimating the height of the animal and then representing
this on your grid paper.

Most likely each of you will have a different sized giraffe on your grid
paper. How can this be possible when each of you is drawing a correctly
proportioned giraffe?

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 51

Children really love to watch baby
giraffes! The fact that they are very
small compared with their mothers
and fathers really amazes kids,
because the baby is so big when
compared with members of the trail
walkers group or even other animals!
This picture shows Jenny with her
new baby boy. He was born on
Saturday, June 20, 1998, at the
Cameron Park Zoo in Waco, Texas. Figure 44.

ACTIVITIES
The baby giraffe weighed 150 pounds and was 6 feet tall when he was
born. His mother weighs one ton and is 19 feet tall. Are these numbers
consistent?

Find a young giraffe or another baby animal with its mother. Estimate
the weight and height of the baby using what you know about the
mothers weight and height. Then ask a zoo attendant how much the
baby weighs and how tall it is. How close was your estimate to the
correct weight and height?

Monkeys love to swing from ropes and swings made of different materials,
delighting children and adults alike with their games and many different
facial expressions! Some of the rope formations are really interesting works
of mathematical art! Heavy roping has been used to make a net for the
monkeys to jump into. They can also climb up the sides of the net. In this
case each rope, those going from left-to-right and those going from front to
back, is shaped very much like a parabola.

52 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

 ACTIVITY
Find various different geometric
shapes within the ropes and tires
used as swings by the monkeys.

Figure 45.

Sidewalks within many zoos in the warmer, southern part of the United
States often have canopies to provide shade for visitors. In this zoo
beautiful, brightly multi-colored, fabric panels are laced together with rope
to follow the curved path of the sidewalk.

ACTIVITIES
Estimate the width and length of
each colored panel and then count
the total number of panels used to
cover the walkway.

Approximately how many square

yards were needed to make the
entire canopy? Figure 46.

Many zoos have started to incorporate different versions of popular childrens

games along their pathways. One such popular game looks like tic-tac-toe
except there are pictures of animals, reptiles, and fish instead of Xs and Os.
For this particular game board each of the nine squares has two faces.

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 53

By placing the nine blocks in a certain
order six real animals can be made.

ACTIVITIES
How many different pictures of
make-believe animals can you make
on this game board?
Figure 47.
Help each other design a game that
could be laid out on one of the zoos sidewalks.

Walking around a zoo always makes people hungry! Have the trail walkers
find a snack bar and look at the menu.

ACTIVITIES
Each trail walker has $8 to spend on
food for the entire day. Decide if you
want to use all of your $8 at lunch or
**** DRINKS ****
if you want to save some money for Sm. $1.00 Med. $1.25 Lg. $2.00
Coke Diet Coke Pepsi Diet Pepsi Sprite
Dr. Pepper Diet Dr. Pepper Big Red
an afternoon snack or drink. How Coffee Tea Ice Tea

many different lunch orders can you ******* COMBO MEALS *******
Each meal includes fries and a med. drink
Hamburger $3.50 Chicken Fingers $4.50
choose with the amount of money Hot Dog $3.25 Mini Corn Dogs $3.50
Chicken Sandwich $3.50
you have decided to use? ***** KIDS COMBO MEALS *****
Each meal includes fries and an 8oz. drink
and a Bucket
Is there a sales tax? If so, how much Chicken Fingers $2.25 Mini Corn Dogs $2.25

******** A LA CARTE ********

will it add to your total bill? Hamburger $2.00 Hot Dog $1.75
French Fries Sm. $.75 Lg. $1.25
Onion Rings Sm. $1.00 Lg. $1.50
Now how much money do you have ********** SNACKS **********
CANDY $.75 CHIPS $.75 POPCORN $1.00
left for an afternoon snack or drink? NACHOS Sm. $1.75 Lg. $3.00

Figure 48.

54 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

Remember throughout the walk to encourage walkers to hunt for geometric
shapes. They might even find a star inscribed within a circle!

ACTIVITIES
Name each of the many different
geometric shapes you can find within
the circle.

Estimate the diameter of the circle and

then find the area.

Work with your fellow trail walkers to

devise a plan to help you find the area
within the star. Figure 49.

Once you have found the area of the circle and the star, how would you
find the area between the circle and the star? What is that area?

Larger and smaller zoos alike often supply each visitor with a map of the
zoo, or there may be a large map of the zoo mounted near the entrance and
at numerous places within the zoo. These maps can suggest many
explorations in graph theory. Perhaps the most natural question is to ask
for the shortest path through the zoo that will visit every exhibit. One
might prefer never to pass by any exhibit more than once, but in many
zoos this will not be possible. For example, if there is a path to a dead end,
like the Herpatorium in the picture, you will have to retrace that path to
get back to Pulse Point 2.

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 55

 Figure 50.

Is there a path that will allow you to get to every exhibit once and only
once? Certainly there cannot be a dead end side trip, but even if there are
no dead ends, can it always be done? Absent such a path, what then? How
about a path through the zoo that repeats as little as possible? Can you
find that?

Many zoos are too large for every exhibit to be seen within the time frame
the trail walkers may have available.

ACTIVITIES
Make a list of the exhibits you really want to see.

Now use the map of the zoo to look for a path that doesnt retrace
any of its sections.

56 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

You might decide that the trail walkers can do only so much walking and
no more. Now how much can you get to see?

In some zoos, there are special opportunities for helping with time and
fatigue. Both the San Diego Zoo and the Bronx Zoo in New York have a
skyride that can help visitors avoid a lot of retracing of steps, provide a rest
in the middle of the tour, and help get walkers to some very interesting
areas in a lot less time. Some zoos also have a tour bus where visitors can
ride and see a lot of the area and exhibits. How do you suppose the
management picks the route for these tours? Some zoos, especially in hilly
terrain, also have escalators to take you from the bottom of a valley to the
top. They, too, can provide a brief rest period in the middle of your visit.
All of these situations provide excellent opportunities for trail walkers to
explore mathematics on a fun-filled outing with family or friends.

Have your group plan a visit to one of these faraway zoos and lay out their
own tours. If the zoo does not have a train or trolley path, have the trail
walkers plan one for the zoo, discussing where the train or trolley would
travel and recommending stopping places for picking up or letting off
passengers.

RECREATIONAL MATHEMATICS IN A MALL

Shopping malls provide wonderful opportunities to blaze a math trail and

discover that mathematics can show up when you least expect it. We
cannot resist, however, bringing to your attention a good math trail
question for mall goers before they start: Why did you come to the mall?
The first answer may well be, because things are so much cheaper. Before
they accept this as fact, you should have them figure the cost of driving to
the mall, and the value of their time spent in getting and being there at the

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 57

mall. Well, what does it cost to drive? The Federal Government, and many
employers, nowadays use about $0.38 per mile as the cost of driving a car
when all factors are considered. If the mall is 20 miles away, thats a round
trip cost of about $15. Will that much money be saved on a trip to the mall?

How about the value of your time? If it takes an hour to drive back and
forth, what could you have done with that time? Could you have done
something around the house or apartment thats been on your to-do list a
long time? Could you have earned some more money by doing part-time
work from home? This may, of course, be the wrong way for you to look at
going to the mall. Perhaps it is the only place nearby where a particular
purchase can be made. If that is the reason, then there is no argument. On
the other hand, many people go to the mall to meet friends, see a new
movie, buy those new sneakers, experience the virtual reality of a video
game, or even ride a roller coaster. You are not going there to save money.
You are going for relaxation and leisure-time values. A little mathematical
thinking makes that quite clear.

As shoppers walk through a mall, usually they are not conscious of the
mathematics surrounding them. Of course, they use mental math to
estimate the cost of a sweater that is on sale to make sure they have enough
money to buy it and to compare prices between stores. But do they actually
give much thought to mathematics not related to purchases? Chances are
the answer to that question is a definite No! Keep in mind that each mall
has its own unique examples of mathematics.

Every store at the mall works hard at attracting customers. One way to do
this is by advertising sales in the local newspaper. This is a good way to
bring people to the mall with the intention of coming to that particular
store. Stores also want to attract the passerby who had no prior plan to visit
the store. This can be done by an eye-catching display in front of the store

58 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

and in each of the stores windows. One such
example is illustrated by a display in front of
a sporting goods store: A clear hexagonal-
shaped column filled with tennis balls. A
word of advice: This example presents the
opportunity for a very large amount of
mathematics. There is a real danger of losing
the trail walker by doing too much in one
spot. We shall mention a variety of possible
topics, and at a trail stop like this, you will
have to pick and choose.
Figure 51.

A first series of questions might concern the shape and size of this column.
Ask walkers to compare the shapes of slices through the column at the top
and at the bottom: They will probably decide that a slice has the same
shape all along the column, but not the same size. Each slice is hexagonal
in shape, and all the hexagons look the same because, while they are all
regular and therefore similar, the lengths of the sides are different. The
walkers may not know or remember the word similar, but they will have
the idea. You can take this further if you want: What exactly is meant by
size of the column? The top of the column has a different diameter than
the bottom of the column. Trail walkers might be asked to decide what
they want to mean by the diameter of the column: Since the column is
vertical, they will naturally come to cross sections at different heights, so
its the diameter of a cross section that we are talking about. They may want
to think about what a diameter should mean. The trail walkers might
decide that they know for sure what they mean by the diameter of a circle
and that the diameter of the cross section is the diameter of the smallest
circumscribing or the largest inscribing circle. Once this is decided, have
the trail walkers estimate both of these diameters.

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 59

 ACTIVITIES
Look at this clear hexagonal-shaped column filled with tennis balls.
Estimate the number of tennis balls in the display column.

Suppose you could make two or three parallel horizontal cuts through
the column. What is the shape of each slice? Compare the shapes of
the slices.

Another series of questions could lead to estimating the volume of the

column. To estimate the volume of the column, start with the heighta
more standard trail-walking problem. The areas of the top and bottom
hexagonal cross section can be estimatedperhaps by observing that they
almost fill the circumscribed circles whose diameters the walkers have
estimated. The walkers may wish to estimate volume as average area times
height. But what does average area mean? As the group of walkers discusses
how to do this, they might use the average of the top and bottom cross
sectional areas as a good estimate of the average cross sectional area. It is
possible they will decide that the average area should be weighted towards
one end or the other. If so, which end should they choose?

ACTIVITIES
Work together to come up with a plan to determine the size of the
column. How would you go about measuring the column?

Estimate the volume of the column. Devise a plan that would help you
to come up with a good estimate.

A further natural series of questions might concern the balls inside the
column. Many tennis balls touch the plexiglass surface. Lets first stick to
balls touching the surface. Trail walkers can pick out one particular tennis

60 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

ball that touches the flat plexiglass surface and count the number of tennis
balls touching that ball that are also touching the plexiglass surface. This
should be done several times in order to make a conjecture about the
maximum number of tennis balls that can touch one tennis ball. If we
think of balls on a flat surface, and of great circles of the balls parallel to
the surface, then we are really trying to see how many circles of equal size
can touch a given circle of that same size. What happens if the problem is
taken from a flat two-dimensional surface to three dimensions? Ask the
walkers to think about how many tennis balls of one size can touch a given
tennis ball of the same size. Without using the terms two-dimensional and
three-dimensional, you can move the walkers discussions and explorations
of two-dimensional ideas into those of three dimensions. In this way the
three-dimensional ideas become natural extensions of two-dimensional ideas.

ACTIVITIES
Find a tennis ball that touches the
plexiglass surface and is
surrounded by other balls also
touching the surface with as small
amount of gaps as possible. Count
the number of balls it takes to
totally surround that tennis ball.
Choose another tennis ball and do
Figure 52.
the same. Make a conjecture about
the number of tennis balls that can
touch one target tennis ball and also the plexiglass.

Suppose you could climb into the column and find a tennis ball totally
surrounded by other tennis balls. What is the largest number of balls that

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 61

 can touch one central ball? Choose another similar ball and do the same.
Try this several times before making a new conjecture about this number
of tennis balls.

The geometric questions that arose from the column of tennis balls lead to
many interesting mathematical possibilities. In laying out the trail guide,
you might center on the geometry as we have done. You might alternatively
choose to start with the question of estimating the number of tennis balls
inside the display. This in turn could lead to successive steps of estimating
the volume and the proportion of the volume occupied by tennis balls.
Questions about the shape of the column and its diameter would then arise
from trying to estimate the volume of the column. The close packing of the
balls becomes important when the walkers try to see what fraction of the
volume the balls occupy.

You will need to choose the setting into which you put this series of
questions. You may feel that estimating the number of tennis balls is just the
right level of both familiarity and challenge to catch the trail walkers
attention. However, if you already have too many arithmetic questions, it
might be better to focus on the geometry. This could later lead into estimating
the number of balls in the column. This idea of using tennis balls is
interesting, but you can look at the same questions with a gumball machine.

Another way to draw shoppers into a store, other than displays, is the
stores sign. If you look at a row of stores in the mall you will notice that
each sign is different. Trail walkers can ask the question why. One reason is
that this leads to a type of eye-catching uniqueness for each different store.
National store chains have the same sign for each of their stores in malls
throughout the U. S. because shoppers become accustomed to that
particular stores sign and seek it out at the different malls they visit.

62 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

 ACTIVITY
If you look at a row of
stores in the mall you
will notice that each
sign is different. Have Figure 53.

you ever asked yourself why this is true? Talk with your fellow trail
walkers and see if you can come up with some reasons as to why this
may be true.

Figure 54.

Consider the spacing between letters in a particular stores name. Are the
letters evenly spaced? The problem of spacing letters in any type of
printing or font is called kerning. Old-fashioned typewriters used a uniform
size for the block each letter occupied, no matter whether the letter was an
l or a w or the number was a 1 or a 5. On the other hand, many fonts on
todays computers have built-in automatic spacing adjustment. This
problem of spacing leads to another type of trail exploration. How is the
letter spacing in a sign decided? What makes it look right? Trail walkers
would need to decide what they mean by the word right. Some walkers
might enjoy trying to formulate in a precise way what makes letter spacing
look good to them. Others might argue that this is a purely aesthetic
question and that such an attempt at a mathematical formulation is
artificial and irrelevant. Is it possible that some stores have signs that
actually are not appealing and eye-catching in their design? If you see such
a possibility, it might make a good trail stop.

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 63

 ACTIVITIES
Look at the spacing between the letters of a particular stores name. Are
the letters evenly spaced? Select the sign of another store and check to
see if those letters are evenly spaced.

How do you think the spacing between letters in each of the signs was
decided upon? What makes it look right?

The floors of malls are great places to look for interesting tiling designs that
can help to explore mathematics and geometry! Some tiling designs are
made up of concentric circles. The walkers might estimate the diameter and
circumference of each of the different circles. But that activity should bring
up another question: Is everyone using the same gauge or unit of
measurement? You should lead the members of the group into explaining
how they are estimating these measurements and have them decide as a
group how to use these different estimates to obtain one best estimate. It
might be that one method of estimating is better than another method or
that taking the average of all the different estimates is best. A similar format
of questions can be used when asking the group to estimate the area of each
of the circles and then comparing the area of the smallest and largest circles.

ACTIVITIES
Estimate the diameter and
circumference of each of the
different circles.

Discuss how the estimates were

arrived at. Did everyone use the
same gauge for estimating?
Figure 55.

64 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

 Is one method better than the others? Decide as a group how you might
use the different estimates to obtain one best estimate.

Compare the diameter and circumference of the smallest and largest

circles.

Repeat this activity for the area of each circle and compare the areas of
the smallest and largest circles.

Make a list of the geometric shapes that

can be found within the circles.

Another floor design involves a circle

surrounding a star. The trail walkers could
find the various regularities and patterns in
this medallion.

Figure 56.

ACTIVITIES
What geometric shapes could have been used to make the star in
Figure 56?

Estimate the diameter, circumference, and area of this circle.

Estimate the area of the star inside the circle.

What percentage of the area of the circle does the star cover?

Do the points nearest the periphery of the circle look equally spaced?
If so, how many degrees are there between consecutive points?

How many degrees are in each point of the star?

Water fountains are great gathering and meeting places at mallschildren

are always fascinated by the water and the sound it makes, they love to
throw coins into the water, and it is a nice place to sit and relax for a while

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 65

before continuing on the journey of the mall. People of all ages like to look
down on the water fountain from a staircase or floor above it. They look at
the shape the water makes as it shoots out and upward and then comes
back downward and splashes into the water in the fountains pool. Children
will sit on the floor near water fountains, look at the water and the arcs
made by the water, and listen to the soothing sound.

Figure 57. Figure 58.

ACTIVITIES
The water shoots out of a vertical pipe in various directions at the same
angle with the vertical. Describe what shape the water makes as it comes
out of the pipe, reaches a peak, and then falls.

Estimate the amount of money on the floor of the fountain.

ACTIVITY
Decide if the pairs make up
squares. Discuss the various
techniques you used to come
to a conclusion.

Figure 59.

66 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

 ACTIVITIES
The pattern is more complex.

What geometric shape is used to

make up this tiling? There are
several correct answers to this
question. Discuss why this is true.

Pick a point of intersection on the

tiles and count the number of
hexagons that meet at that point.
Use this result to help you decide Figure 60.

how many degrees there are in each

angle of a regular hexagon.

How many total degrees are there in a regual hexagon? Is this result the
same for a non-regular hexagon? Are you surprised by the answer?

Now find as many different quadrilateral, pentagonal, and heptagonal

shapes as you can in the tiles.

On the upper floors of many malls there are open areas surrounded by
brass railings where shoppers can look down on other shoppers and stores
on the lower floors. In the mall used in this illustration, the brass railing is
in the shape of an oval (two parallel lines with semi-circles at each end).
The walkers may not agree on a definition of oval. This is an example
where the meanings of a word in everyday English and in mathematics may
not agree. Some walkers may wish to call this an oval, while others, and
you, may not. Would you call it an oval if it were a running track around a
football field?

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 67

 Figure 61. Figure 62.

ACTIVITY
Go to the open atrium area on one of the floors of the mall. What is the
shape of the brass railing? Explain how you came to your decision.

Throughout most malls there are benches for people to sit on. Many of the
benches are straight, but sometimes they are curved. The mall designers
probably did this so that the curve of the bench would follow the curve of
the railing. An interesting question for trail walkers to consider would be
how would a carpenter make a curved bench like this one? The pattern of
the wood of what had been the rings of the tree suggest whether the curved
bench was made by cutting the shape from the wood or by soaking the
wood until it is very wet, bending it, keeping it in the desired shape, and
then allowing the wood to dry completely.

Figure 63. Figure 64.

68 PART 2 - MATH TRAILS

 ACTIVITY
See if you can find a curved bench in the mall. How do you think the
carpenter would make a curved bench like this one?

See if you can find an empty store in the local mall. Have trail walkers
estimate the square footage of the empty store. Then they could think
about the monthly rent per square foot, and what the monthly cash flow
would have to be to make a profit.

ACTIVITIES
Estimate the number of square feet in this empty store.

Go to the mall management office and ask about the monthly rental of
the store. How much does it cost to rent each square foot of the store
each month?

Is rent the only cost the store must pay each month? If not, estimate the
amount of these other monthly expenditures.

How much money would the store need to take in every month in order
to break even? How much money would be needed for the store to make
a profit?

A mall is a great place to find all kinds of mathematics at work! You have
now taken a short walk around one mall and discovered some mathematics.
Now go and see if you can discover even more on your own.

MATH TRAILS - PART 2 69

PART 3 MATHEMATICS OF SEVERAL KINDS OF TRAIL SITUATIONS

PARKING
As you are walking along, you see cars parked along the curb or in a
parking lot in front of a supermarket or a neighborhood group of stores.
There are a lot of questions you might ask about the parking. For example,

1) On most streets, parking is often parallel parking, while in parking lots

it is often angle parking. If the street is very wide, you might also see
angle parking there. Why is parallel parking common on normal width
streets, but angle parking more likely on wide boulevards? What do you
think? Typical comments that people might make is that angle parking,
if the angle is not too big, is easier for the driver than parallel parking.
You can go right in without pulling up parallel to the car in front of the
space and then backing in, so why isnt all parking angle parking if its
that much easier? Is it perhaps because of the less efficient use of
space? First of all, cars parked at an angle use up more of the width of
the street than parallel parked cars. How much more? If you imagine
the car to be roughly a rectangle, say length L and width W, the parallel
parking uses up a width W from the width of the street. Is that all?
Well, maybe an extra few inches since one doent always back perfectly
to the curb. (Also, if you have a passenger who has some difficulty
getting out of the car, you may have to stay a bit further from the curb
so the passenger can comfortably step onto the street first before
stepping up to the sidewalk.) If you park at an angle, how much extra
width do you take from the street because the rear end of the car sticks
out a little? See if you can figure that out.

Now, back to angle parking and another aspect of it. When you park at
an angle you leave a little triangle-shaped area empty. Where is it? Its

70 PART 3 - MATH TRAILS

edges are the front bumper of the car, the white line (or the edge next
to the car), and the sidewalk. A further triangle behind the car is also
wasted if it isnt marked in any way, like the one in front, but does take
something more away from the usable width of the street. How big are
these triangles in front and in back of the car? How would you find
out? Use a formula? Measure? Guess? Those are all OK.

Figure 65.

Hey, wait a minute! If the angle in the angle parking is big enough,
these triangles youre talking about are awfully small. In fact,
sometimes thay arent there at all! Suppose you pull in at right angles
(or you can say perpendicular) to the curb. There is no wasted triangle.
You see here an important point about thinking mathematically: You
have to be precise. It is true that there are little wasted triangles for
most angle parking, but not when the angle is 0 or 90. You have to
account for such exceptionssome people call them limiting cases
when you are being thorough.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of perpendicular parking?

Disadvantages: You are taking more width away from the streetthis
time you take L away rather than W plus a little bit. Also, perpendicular
spaces are harder to get into than most angle spaces: You cant go
straight in, but have to pull up at an angle behind the next car, back
up, and then go in. This maneuver needs a pretty wide street.

MATH TRAILS - PART 3 71

Advantage: You can get more cars into a given length of parking
frontage. How much more? Is it really worth the trouble? Figure it out.
For a typical car, is L as much as twice W? What do you think? If it
were twice, what would you do to the number of parking spaces by
having perpendicular rather than parallel parking? (In a sample of one,
W was a little more than 6, and L a bit more than 15.)

Lets get back to angle parking that isnt either parallel or perpendicular.
When you see angle parking on a wide street, about how big an angle
do you think it is? How does someone decide at what angle to the curb
to paint the white lines? Its perhaps a balance between making it easy
to get in and out, and the waste of space caused by the little triangles.
At what angle do you think the little triangles are biggest? The answer
turns out to be 45. What tends to be the angle of angle parking? A
guess is that, in many places, angle parking tends to be at about 30.
This brings up an interesting point. If you are out on a math trail, how
do you estimate an angle anyway? We typically know various rules of
thumb for estimating length. You might know the length of your foot
or your arm or the length of your stride. You know how to use
shadows. But what do you know that would allow you to estimate an
angle? Not many people have a technique for that. Please look in the
section called Estimation on pp. 108111 of this book for a nice method.

Mathematical Note: One way to see how far a car parked at an angle
sticks out into the road is to develop a formula. If the acute angle
between the long side of the car and the curb is , then the furthest
distance of the front of the car from the curb is W cos . From that
point, the car sticks a further L sin into the street. So how much
space does the car take from the width of the street? W cos + L sin .
So if L were 15, W were 6, and were 30 then the car would stick

72 PART 3 - MATH TRAILS

out about 12.7. This is well over the 6 if it were parallel parked, but
less than the 15 of perpendicular parking.

For what value of does the car stick out the most, and at what angle
would that happen? It turns out that the most the car ever sticks out is
a little over 16, and this happens if is about 68. So at worst it sticks
out more than its length! Did you expect that?

Lets finish with a nice, open-ended, debatable question, how can the
traffic department pick ? There are lots of ways of thinking about this,
but heres one: Its a tradeoff. If you make large, so that cars are close
to perpendicular to the curb, then you use up a lot of the width of the
street, but you save on how much curb you use up. If, on the other
hand, you have parallel parking, you take as little as possible from the
width of the street, but you use an awful lot of curb. If the car is 6
wide and 15 long and you do perpendicular parking, your spaces are
probably about 8 wide because you need about 2 for opening the door.
(Why didnt we say 10, for opening doors on both sides?) How far does
the car stick out into the street? It sticks out about 15. So perpendicular
parking uses 8 of curb and 15 of width. Parallel parking will use about
17 of curb (to allow 2 between cars), but very little more than 6 of
width (with parallel parking, an open door doesnt run into another
car). At a 60 acute angle between car and curb, you would use a little
more than 9 of curb (a bit more than perpendicular parking) and stick
out about 16. What, more than perpendicular parking? Yes, because at
worst you stick out the length of a diagonal of our standard car, which
is a bit more than 16. Heres a little table for a car in the shape of a
rectangle 6 long, 15 wide, and doors that need 2 to open.

MATH TRAILS - PART 3 73

 Angle Length of curb Street width used
90 (perpendicular) 8 15
60 9 16
45 11.3 16.3
30 16 14.4
0 (parallel) 17 12 at a minimum

What you see is that most values of the angle use a lot of street width
and only parallel parking conserves street width. What you find in
many communities is that you have parallel parking on most streets
because width is scarce, and angle parking on wide enough streets in
shopping areas because curb space is scarce.

2) We have mentioned that, in most places, white lines typically mark

parking spaces. Why are parking spaces marked? Oh come on,
dont be so nave, so that people can put parking meters next to
them and make money for the town! But thats not true in a mall or
supermarket parking lot. They dont have meters, but they still have
marked parking spaces. One purpose might be to channel the traffic
so that cars dont run into each other. Another purpose might be to
use space more efficiently. If you allow people to park anywhere,
they will leave an empty space between cars that is too small for
another car, but way more than safety requires. Lets think about
this last one. If people were to be allowed to park anywhere there
was enough room, how much space would they waste?

It so happens that when you start to look at this question, its not easy.
Lets begin by simplifying it. Lets not imagine a parking lot because it is
two-dimensional and people could conceivably park in any direction, a
horrendous complication we dont need. Lets go to a more rural town,

74 PART 3 - MATH TRAILS

or maybe a spa, where making money with parking meters isnt a big
deal. A good image to have in mind, for example, would be the main
street in Saratoga Springs, NY, which is a nice wide street with (when
last seen) neither meters, nor marked parking spaces. You just parallel
park anywhere there is enough room!

How can you analyze this? When you consider parallel parking, you
want to have a minimum space between cars. So this time let L
represent the length of a car plus a couple of feet around it for safety
and a little maneuvering room. Imagine that all cars are the same
length. That isnt true in the real world. Also some drivers are better
parallel parkers than others and may feel more comfortable getting into
a smaller space. These additional complications are real, of course, but
enough of the essence of the problem remains without them. Lets try
an example. Say that the length of the block available for possible
parking is 300 feet. The sign says No parking within 50 feet of the
corner so subtract 50 feet at each end for safety. We are left with 200
feet for cars and well make each space 20 feet long. So, if you have
marked spaces you can park 10 cars. Now suppose a car comes along;
parks in a space thats S feet long, where S is at least 20; and leaves the
rest of the space, namely S 20 feet, divided randomly between space
in front and back of the car. How much of S 20 will be wasted? If
S < 40, then all of it will be (why?) but its not this cars fault. A
previous car loused things up by leaving a space thats too large but still
holds only one car. But if S > 40, then the present car has a chance
either to waste parking frontage or to conserve it. What are the
possibilities? Try some cases and see.

So how would you find out what is likely to happen without marked
parking spaces? It turns out that this is a tough problem even for

MATH TRAILS - PART 3 75

professional mathematicians. (It was first solved by the Hungarian
mathematician A. Renyi in 1958, and is still a subject of active
research.) You might try a few very simple cases like S between 40 and
60, and then use these to make some guesses. Or, if you get too
interested, you could perhaps simulate the situation: Use random
numbers to locate the front, or the middle, of the next car, and see how
many cars you can place before every remaining space is less than 20
feet. The answer is that, on a long block, about 25% of the space will be
wasted on the average.

3) While were at the subject of meters, you might want to think about
whether meters really do pay. The simplest question might be
whether a meter pays for itself during its lifetime. How much
money is a meter likely to take in during one dayor week or
month or year; how much does a new meter cost, how long does it
last? Thats a simple form of the question. You might go on from
there. If something goes wrong with a meter, is it easily repaired or
do you have to junk it? Whats most likely to go wrong anyway?
Perhaps people putting in a wrong coin or a slug and thereby
jamming the meter, or perhaps a car bumping into it. The oldest
author remembers 50 years ago, when he was a student taking the
East Boston ferry. They had a turnstile to enter. He tried a nickel
too big. He grumbled and tried a dime, which got stuck. At this
point a worker came over, gave him a dirty look, took the dime out
and gave it back to himand told him it cost a penny! Even then,
one didnt think that anything cost a penny!

Now we can make the problem a little more complicated, and a little
more realistic. If you dont hire any meter readers, for example, drivers
might just ignore the meters. So you need people to visit the meters

76 PART 3 - MATH TRAILS

periodically and write out parking tickets if the meter hasnt been fed
sufficiently. How many people? Enough so that a driver will not feel its
worth the risk to leave the meter unfed. An itinerary for the meter
reader should not be too regular (people might learn to outguess it),
but the reader does need to visit every meter every so often. How
would you make out a route and a schedule for a meter reader? How
many would you hire? When you take their salaries and benefits into
account, does it still pay the city to have parking meters? What else
does the system within which the meter readers operate include? Do
the fines they levy balance their loaded salaries and the costs of the
associated judicial system?

4) Maybe one more math trail question about parking. As you walk
around and observe the traffic, can you tell if the town has enough
parking? In some places this is a subject of hot debate. If we had
more parking, not so many people would go to the mall.

If we had more parking, more people from nearby communities

would come here to shop.

If we had more parking, people from other communities would

come here just to take the train, cause all kinds of traffic problems,
pollute the environment, and make this a less desirable place to
live. So there are lots of ways to argue. What would you suggest as
a way to tell if the community had enough parking?

Some people will tell you that they just arent going to shop here
because they can never find a parking space. You could take data of
that kind, but thats a bigger, long-term project. The receipts from each
parking meter will tell you something about how much it is used but
you dont have that information right now. Heres one thing you can do

MATH TRAILS - PART 3 77

immediately: When a car pulls out of a parking space, time how long it
takes before someone else pulls in. In one town, the average figure was
only about 20 seconds! Would you take that as a clear indication of a
shortage of spaces, at least in that part of town? Do you have a better
measure to suggest?

SUPERMARKETS
If the math trail takes you into a supermarket, there are many interesting
items you might want to consider. Lets talk about a few of them.

1) You have a choice of several size packages of a particular item.

Which size should you get? One way of looking at this, of course,
simply deals with the price. Which is cheaper? Usually, but not
quite always, the smaller package is cheaper. So what? We shouldnt
be looking at the total price, but the price per unit weight, say per
pound. Nowadays you no longer have to try to figure this out, the
label under the item on the shelf is supposed to tell you. (You
should check that the label takes into account the temporary
change in price if the item is on sale.) You still have to think a little
more: If the larger package is cheaper per pound, as it often is, will
you be able to use it up before it gets stale or spoils? Will there be
someone in the family for whom it is too heavy to lift?

The computation can get trickier if you have a coupon that is valid for
either size you are considering and gives you the same discount. The
price per pound thats written underneath the shelf may not be the best
way to look at it any more. The smaller item may well have become
cheaper by pound when you subtract the refund from the coupon. But
the problem is different if the coupon is for something you use a lot.

78 PART 3 - MATH TRAILS

You have only one coupon! Maybe you should just buy the larger item
at the price reduced by the coupon, because if you buy the smaller one,
youll have to get a large one pretty soon anyway.

2) Where do you look for things on the shelves? There are items that
people tend to run out of unexpectedly, that lead to a quick trip to the
store. What, for example? Lets say milk. You have probably noticed
that in many stores, milk is quite a long way from the door and the
cash registers. Why is that? Because something like 30% of all
supermarket purchases represent impulse buying, something you
didnt intend to get when you came in the store. The further you have
to go when you come into the store, the more likely you are to buy
something else too. So milk and hamburger tend to be a long walk.

Supermarket managers may complain that this is unfair criticism. These

items require refrigeration, and the sections in which food is kept chilled
are naturally at the walls. Thats the way one builds supermarkets. Also
the refrigerated storage for meats is often at the back of the store, and the
meat counters will be close to that. All that is true, but there is also
another phenomenon. We are beginning to see frozen food sections in
the middle of the store rather than against the walls. In the summer,
these help with the cooling of the store as well as of the products. In the
winter, the heat removed from the cold storage can be used to help heat
the store itselfin which case you might like this heat source to be more
in the middle of the store. All were saying is that refrigeration may no
longer be a good excuse for shelving milk and hamburger far away.

Lets return to the locations of items on the shelves. Think of the cereal
aisle. How do you suppose they decide at what height to put a
particular product? Why do high-fiber cereals tend to be on the top or

MATH TRAILS - PART 3 79

the bottom shelf, while the Soggies, which are the latest kiddie rage,
show up in their glorious multicolored packages on the middle shelf? A
possible explanation is that cereals that are advertised on Saturday
morning childrens television are put at the height of a child seated in
the carriage. That way the child will see it, ask (a euphemism for whine)
for it, and there you have one more impulse buy.

You may want to think about the following question, not just for the
supermarket, but also for a 5-and-10 (if there still are any), and for any
good-sized store. How much of one item should you display? If you
display too little you will keep running out, and restocking the shelves
in the middle of the day may be a nuisance. But space is valuable, and if
you display too much you are wasting space needed for some additional
product. On the other hand, even if the item is huge, you have to show
at least one! Whats a good balance? Do you use extra space for items
you sell a lot of or items that you wish you sold a lot of, but dont? Some
stores use the most prominent display areassay in front of the store
opposite the cash registersfor weekly specials. Why? Perhaps people
get a little angry if they come in for an advertised special and cant find
it. Better to put those items where people can see them right away, and
then let them shop further in a happy frame of mind.

3) Many supermarkets have express lanes for people with n packages

or less. What is the value of n in the store in which you are at the
moment? Is it 10 packages? What other values of n have you seen?
Various supermarkets across the country seem to allow anywhere
from 5 to 15 packages in the express lane. If the number varies that
much, maybe people dont really know what it should be. How
many packages do you think should be allowed in an express lane?

80 PART 3 - MATH TRAILS

How do you think about a question like that? One way would be to
figure out first why you have an express lane at all. Thats easy, to keep
customers happy. Yes, but how do you do that? You might want to
minimize the average waiting time at the checkout position. Average,
eh? Average over what, average wait per customer, or average wait per
package? Does it make a difference? In the first statement, you are
saying that all customers are created equal. A long wait for any of them
is equally bad. The second statement says that customers with a lot of
packages can wait longer than customers with just a few; the wait per
package might still be equal. There are other possible criteria. You
might say that its really long waits that are a problem. In that case you
want to minimize maximum waiting time. Maybe your consumer
research has shown that people are willing to wait ten minutes; after
that, they shove the carriage into a corner and go elsewhere. So what
you want to do is to minimize the probability that the wait exceeds ten
minutesor whatever number you believe. How do all these criteria
square with the following argument? If you restrict the number of
packages in any lane, there will be times when under your rule that
lane is idle, but would be in use if there was no restriction. Therefore
an express lane must increase waiting time. Under what assumptions
would this actually be true?

Once you know what the waiting line is supposed to accomplish, you
can then take some data. How many people get in line with how many
packages? How does the time to go through the line vary with the
number of packages? Do four packages take twice as long as two? No,
because there is a setup time, which is the time to get ready for the
next customer, no matter how many packages s(he) has. But once you
take that into account the time may be linear, at least until the point at
which you need two bags instead of one.

MATH TRAILS - PART 3 81

One suggestion that has been made is that it takes a person to staff an
express lane. Allow as many packages in the express lane as will keep
one person as fully occupied as you can. Dont allow a queue to grow at
that counter, but dont allow much idle time either. Thats the most
efficient way to use the checker! Heres a clever ideathink of the
problem from the point of view of the store management, not of the
customer. The customer enters the solution if the number of packages
this rule allows is too small. In that case, get a second express lane.

One supermarket we have seen disables all express lanes at the busiest
time, namely Friday night. What do you suppose is their idea of the
purpose of an express lane?

BUILDINGS
Almost any size locality has a fairly tall building. It may be a church, or
a big old house, or an apartment or an office building. Its fun to
estimate how tall this building is. How many ways can you think of
doing that? If its a sunny day, shadows are a natural thought. Say the
shadow of the building is 30 tall, how tall is the building? Well, you
have to know something else! Say you are 5 tall and your shadow is 3.
Then the shadow of the building is ten times your shadow, and
therefore the height of the building would be ten times your height. So
you would estimate the height of the building at 50.

Another way to think about this would be to count floors. If you see 6
floors from ground level on up, and you guess that the ceilings are
about 8 feet from the floor, you might guess 48 feet for the height of
the building. What adjustments might you make to this first estimate?
First of all, the 8 feet is only a guess. Also, there is some distance from
the ceiling at one level to the floor of the next, and we have five of

82 PART 3 - MATH TRAILS

those gaps to account for. There is also a roof of some thickness. Maybe
the main floor is built for the kind of business that needs higher
ceilings than the upstairs offices. All in all if any of these thoughts
apply, you might adjust your estimate to 55 feet.

If its a church, trying to argue about floors wont get you very far. You
might still be able to guess the height of a big window, and estimate
how many times the height of the window is to the height of the
church. What else might you try?

As you walk through the town, you might look for different geometric
shapes. Windows in many buildings are in the form of rectangles; in
churches you often see circles, or rectangles surmounted by semicircles
or surrounded by other, fancier shapes. Sometimes you see square
windows. On some pavements, you find triangles and hexagons and
octagons. When a piece of pavement has been cut out for a tree, what
shapes might you see there? Can you find a pentagon somewhere?

Brick buildings and brick walls offer some nice possible stops for a
math trail. There are many possible patterns in which bricks are laid,
and they have both practical and aesthetic features that you can
examine. Lets begin by looking at two patterns, both are seen
frequently in brick walls.

Figure 66.

MATH TRAILS - PART 3 83

Each of these is called a bond, which means an arrangement of bricks
in a wall in such a manner as to prevent any collection of adjacent
vertical joints, which would be very bad for the strength of the wall.
When a brick is laid lengthwise, as every brick is in the first pattern, it
is called a stretcher. A brick laid so that the end is facing you, as
every other row is in the second pattern, is called a header. What do
you notice about the dimensions of a stretcher and a header?
The thickness, of course, is the same, but the stretcher is a tiny bit
longer than twice a header. The most common bricks have dimensions
2 x 3 3/4 x 8. This has the effect that two headers, when laid, are
exactly as long as one stretcher. How? This happens because there is an
extra 1/4 (or is it 1/2?) of mortar in between the bricks. This 2 to 1
ratio is the basis of innumerable patterns for laying bricks. The first of
the two patterns above is called running stretcher bond and the
second is called an English bond.

It is interesting to find out what movements of the brick patterns bring

the pattern exactly on top of itself. In the running stretcher bond, if
you move the full length of a brick to the right (or left), you come back
onto the same pattern. If you move two rows up or down, you come
back onto the same pattern. If you move only one row up, you also
have to move half a brick sideways to come back onto the same
pattern. A motion that brings you back onto the same pattern is called
a symmetry of the pattern. So moving one brick length horizontally,
or two brick widths vertically, or one width vertically and half a length
horizontally at the same time are all symmetries of the pattern. Are
there any others? Well, you could imagine drawing a horizontal line
through the middle of a row of bricks and taking a mirror image across
that line. You might call that reflecting across that line. For what
vertical lines would the same thing be true? Also, there might be points

84 PART 3 - MATH TRAILS

where you can rotate the whole pattern around them by some amount
and come back to the same pattern. Can you see any?

Try these same questions for the other pattern. A way of distinguishing
brick patterns might be to examine their collection of symmetries. By
the way, if you follow one symmetry by another, will you get yet
another symmetry? One consequence of this, if its true, is that there are
an awful lot of symmetries of a brick pattern. Not in the real world, of
course, in which real walls begin and end (and arent made that
precisely anyway) but in the geometric abstraction of a brick wall with
which we have been playing.

A HIKE IN THE COUNTRY

There are many different kinds of walks and terrain, so all we can do is
give some examples of ideas. If the state park or the national forest you
are in has provided a trail map, then you have the opportunity to map
out the route you want to follow and the time it should take. You can
use time and distance estimates, features on the map as well as in the
terrain itself, to keep track of where you are and what you should be
looking for next. A good map also allows you to judge the desirability
of a particular hike: The views you will have, access to drinking water,
the changes in elevation, and the amount of backtracking you may have
to do. Some people try to combine features such as these into an index
of expected pleasure for a particular route.

Many trails follow brooks or rivers some of the way, and it is fun to
estimate the speed of flow. Someone will perhaps estimate a distance
from where you are standing to a reference point, and then time a twig
or leaf that youve thrown in; thats one way to do it. You may observe
that very few flowing bodies of water are straight and a larger stream

MATH TRAILS - PART 3 85

that has not been regulated is likely to have a large number of
meanders. Why do you suppose rivers meander, and what determines
the amount of bending (someone may show off and say curvature or
radius of curvature)? Basically rivers bend because a straight river is
not stable: A little departure from straightness tends to lead to more
departure from straightness. Often, human attempts to straighten a
river lead to the water moving too fast and causing unexpected erosion
downstream. Rivers seem to want to meander.

You pick up a leaf and ask what tree it came from. The group may agree
its from a maple or an oak or a beech or a dogwood. The question is,
how do we tell? We look for particular patterns in the shape or the
color. If a leaf has lots of ins and outs then it can be from a maple or an
oak, but not from a dogwood or beech, which have leaves that are
pretty much convex. To make the difference precise: For example, if
you take two spots on a beech leaf and imagine drawing a line segment
between them, it will always be on the leaf, while this is far from true
on an oak or maple. Thats one way of making the notion of convex
precise. How can you tell an oak leaf from a maple leaf? The maple leaf
has a lot of pointed ends while the oak leaf ends are more rounded.
How would you write down a sequence of choices that would permit a
decision among a larger variety of different leaves?

If trail walkers enjoy the leaf question, you can try a scheme in a
similar spirit for the bark of trees or for animal tracks or for wild
flowers or birdcalls.

If you walk by some farmers fields surrounded by fences or stonewalls,

you might wonder how big the field is. Farmers in Brazil are said to
estimate the area of fields with four more-or-less straight sides

86 PART 3 - MATH TRAILS

(quadrilaterals is the fancy term) by taking the average length of each
pair of opposite sides and finding the product of these average lengths.
What do you think of this method? Does it give a pretty good guess
much of the time? Do you think it tends to give too big or too small an
answer? When does it give the right answer by our understanding of
what we mean by area? Remember, of course, that our notion of area is
what our mathematical types have developed over the centuries, and
other people have every right to define a notion of area to suit their
convenience and utility.

One thing you often see on a farm is an old wagon wheel. If the condition
is at all good, it will have a series of spokes that connect the outer circle
to an inner polygon. The interior of the polygon will be the hole through
which an axle used to go. If you see such a wheel, how many spokes does
it have? If you imagine the outer rim made up of arcs that end at the
spokes, how many such arcs are there? If the inner polygon has edges
that end at the spokes, how many such edges are there?

As an example, suppose the wheel has 8 spokes. Then the number of

arcs comprising the outer rim is also 8, and so is the number of sides of
the inner polygon. Now imagine the simplest possible line drawing of
the wheelnot very realistic, I admitconsisting of an outer circle
made up of 8 arcs, 8 line segments representing the spokes, and 8 edges
of the inner octagon. On this line drawing there are 16 places where
line segments or arcs meet. We call these vertices. There are 24 line
segments, or arcscall them edges. The piece of paper on which you
made the line drawing is divided into how many regions? Well, inside
the circular rim there are 8 sections bounded by spokes and one inner
polygon where the axle would go. Outside the circular rim there is one
region, the rest of your piece of paper. This makes 10 regions. If you

MATH TRAILS - PART 3 87

take vertices minus edges plus regions, you get 16 24 + 10 = 2. With
a different number of spokes, youd still get 2try it! For any line
drawing you make with vertices, edges, and regions in the plane, youll
get 2! This is known as Eulers formula.

TILINGS
We are going to do a very leisurely, purely arithmetic, classification of
semi-regular tilings. We present this in case the question comes up in
your trail planning and you choose to pursue it. The more rapid
algebraic classification is quicker and more familiar, but may be too
much concentrated mathematics all at once. Of course, ours may be
just as bad!

On many possible math trails, we will see tilings on the floor or the
walls or the pavement. Each individual tile is typically in the shape of a
polygon made out of clay, plastic, linoleum, or wood, or else designed
into the cement as if the pattern was made of individual tiles. There are
tilings that are not regular in any sense, for example, a walkway made
of rectangular stones of various sizes. We are not talking about those.
What distinguishes the bathroom or floor tilings? It looks like the
whole tiling has the same pattern that repeats itself many times and
could go on indefinitely, at least as long as the money and the supply of
tiles holds out. (There may be a border in some different pattern, but
we are ignoring that.) It also looks like every corner where the tiles
come together looks just like every other corner. It also appears, in
many cases, but by no means all, that every tile is a regular polygon.

88 PART 3 - MATH TRAILS

People have standard names for these things. If the pattern could go on
forever in all directions, if every corner looks like every other corner, if
every tile is a regular polygon, and if all these polygons have the same
shape and size, we call it a regular tiling. The honeycomb pattern of
hexagons that is so typical of bathroom floors, and the squares laid end
to end on bathroom walls are examples of regular tilings. On the other
hand: If the pattern could go on forever in all directions, if every corner
looks like every other corner, if every tile is a regular polygon, but more
than one kind of regular polygon is allowed, we call it a semi-regular
tiling. Very likely you have seen some of these. Perhaps the most
common consists of squares and octagons. It looks like this:

Figure 67.

(4,82)

You can see this can extend indefinitely, that every tile is a regular
polygon, but that more than one polygon is involved. We do need to
check that all the corners are alike: Each corner is indeed a corner of a
square and of two octagons, so this is a semi-regular tiling.

At this point, ask yourself what other regular and semi-regular tilings
you have seen. Make a list. This is not a trivial point, by the way. HOW
does one make a list? When do you want to call two tilings the same
and when do you want to call them different? What we hope you
discover as you make a list is that you need a system, some way of

MATH TRAILS - PART 3 89

listing possibilities that tries to make sure you dont miss anything. We
will now show you one such system.

A START: 6 POLYGONS AT A CORNER

The basis of our system is the fact that every corner must look like
every other corner. Lets start by asking how many polygons come
together at a corner. Well, the measures of the angles that meet at a
corner must add up to to 360. How large is each angle? Well the
smallest angle you can find in any regular polygon is in an equilateral
triangle, where each angle measures 60. On the other hand, since each
component figure is a regular polygon, each angle measures less than
180. This says that there can be no more than six regular polygons
meeting at a corner (if they are all equilateral triangles), and that there
have to be at least threebecause two numbers each less than 180
cannot add up to 360. OK, there have to be six, five, four, or three
polygons meeting at a corner, and if its six, they have to be six identical
equilateral triangles. So thats a regular, not just a semi-regular tiling.
You can get it, for example, by taking the honeycomb tiling of regular
hexagons and dividing each hexagon into six triangles (Figure 79).

5 POLYGONS AT A CORNER

Now, lets roll up our sleeves and continue to work systematically. What
angles do you get in regular polygons? The formula from geometry is:
If the regular polygon has n sideswe call it an n-goneach angle
measures, in degrees, 180(n 2)/n. Make a table of these angle
measures for n up to 12. So how can you get five polygons at a corner?
After the triangle, in which every angle measures 60, the next regular
polygon is a square with each angle measuring 90. Can you get 360 by
adding five numbers each of which is either a 60 or a 90? Just one 90

90 PART 3 - MATH TRAILS

and four 60s gives 330, which is too small. Two 90s and three 60s gives
360theres one! Three 90s and two 60s gives 390, which is too big,
and more than three 90s is even worse. So we have found a new
possible semi-regular tiling made up of three triangles and two squares
at each corner.

Is there such a tiling? Yes, probably you found one when you were
trying out possibilities. You take a strip as long as you feel like drawing
it, and cut it into squares.

Figure 68.

Then you attach a strip of equilateral triangles above and below the
strip of squares, and another strip of squares above and below that. You
can continue alternating strips of squares and equilateral triangles as
long as you like, so that you do indeed have a tiling. Is it semi-regular?
Yes, at each corner there are two squares and three equilateral triangles,
just as we said.

Figure 69.

(33,42)

Can you make a tiling with five polygons and use any regular
pentagons? An angle in a regular pentagon measures 108, which
would leave 252 for four more angles. No combination of measures of

MATH TRAILS - PART 3 91

angles from equilateral triangles, squares, or regular pentagons (60, 90,
or 108) can add up to 252, so no such tiling is possible.

Can you use five polygons if one is a regular hexagon? The angle of a
hexagon is 120, and this plus four 60 angles makes 360. So a semi-
regular tiling with four equilateral triangles and one regular hexagon
meeting at each corner is a possibility. Can it be drawn? Yes, see below.

Figure 70.

(34,6)

This finishes tilings with five polygons meeting at each corner. Well,
almost. There is one more point we have to consider. Lets summarize
what we know about semi-regular tilings: If 6 polygons meet at each
corner; every polygon is an equilateral triangle. If 5 polygons meet at
each corner, we have seen that they could be three triangles and two
squares, or they could be four triangles and a hexagon. We have also
seen tiling of each kind. What we havent said is that these two
examples are the only possible tilings with these particular polygons.
Could there perhaps be a different looking tiling where three triangles
and two squares meet at each corner?

Isnt that just like a mathematician! Just when you are beginning to get
into the process of learning about a problem, and even enjoying it, here

92 PART 3 - MATH TRAILS

they come and try to rain on our parademake life more complicated!
Why? The trouble is that as mathematicians we are trained to be as
scrupulously careful and honest as we can be. If you havent looked
into the question of whether there is only one tiling with three triangles
and two squares at each corner, we havent done the best job we can!
So all right, is there only one?

Obviously we are going to do more than just count polygons. What can
we say about the order in which we find the three triangles and the two
squares as we go around a corner? In our tiling, the two squares are
adjacent to each other, and then the three triangles are adjacent to each
other. Could the two squares be separated?

Well, separated by what? Triangles. How many?

As you go all the way around a corner, if the two
squares are not adjacent then they must be
separated by one triangle and then by two
Figure 71.
triangles. The corner has to look like this:

Can you continue this tiling indefinitely? It doesnt look very

promising, but all you can do is try. Are you constrained in how such a
tiling would continue? For
example, the two edges of the
upper left square have to be
edges of triangles to the west
and north. These triangles will
have a square between them,
and so forth. Yes, you can
continue such a tiling
indefinitely; see right.
(32,4,3,4) Figure 72.

MATH TRAILS - PART 3 93

So there are two different tilings that use three triangles and two
squares at each corner. The previous one, where three triangles are
adjacent and the two squares are adjacent, can be written like this:
(3,3,3,4,4)or, more compactly, (33,42). The tiling we have just seen,
where the squares are separated, can be written (32,4,3,4).

Our other semi-regular tiling with five polygons, which we can now
write as (34,6), is unique. How do you know? Because after the first
corner, every move is forced since every corner must look the same.

4 POLYGONS AT A CORNER

Had enough? Oh, but you cant quit yet. We still have to look at four
polygons and three polygons at each corner. Again, we need a system.
Lets look at four polygons at each corner. Whats the smallest angle?
We want to see how many triangles there will be at each corner,
because triangles have the smallest angle, namely 60. First suppose
there is no triangle. Then the smallest angle measure is 90. But there
are four angles that add up to 360 and the smallest is 90! So each one
is 90, there are four squares, and we have the familiar all-square
regular tiling, which we call (44). Good.

Next, lets try exactly one triangle. That says one angle measures 60
and every other angle is at least 90. How can you do that? If you take
one square, you have now accounted for 60 + 90 = 150, and that
leaves 210 to go with two polygons. So one must have an angle below
half of 210, i.e., 105 and the other above 105, but there are no
regular polygons with angles between 90 and 108. Therefore the
smaller one must be 90 and the larger one 120. We have a triangle,
two squares, and a hexagon; we have learned to write that as (3,42,6) if
the squares share an edge, and (3,4,6,4) if they dont. Are these possible?

94 PART 3 - MATH TRAILS

(3,4,6,4) with the squares separated is drawn
on the right, but (3,42,6) cant be done. Why z
not? Try it and youll see. Suppose it was y
x
possible: Draw such a corner, at y: Figure 73.

Now what will you do at z to the northwest of y? You must have two
squares there, and they will be adjacent. But now you have two squares
at x that are not adjacent and your attempt at a semi-regular tiling has
failed. Here, now is the (possible) (3,4,6,4):

Figure 74.

(3,4,6,4)
Lets get back to our system. We have taken care of zero or one triangle
at a corner, what about two? If you have two 60 angles, you have 240
left to go, which means either two 120 angles or one 90 and one 150
angle. The first is a (32,62) or a (3,6,3,6), while the second is a (32,4,12)
or a (3,4,3,12). Quickly youll see that (32,62) cant be done (just as we
did above, it cant continue very far) and (3,6,3,6) is the following:

Figure 75.

(3,6,3,6)

MATH TRAILS - PART 3 95

What about two 3s, a 4, and a 12? You will find when you try it that
neither (32,4,12) nor (3,4,3,12) (either the two 3s share an edge or they
dont) can be continued very far. Neither of them can make a semi-
regular tiling.

So we have finished the case of four polygons meeting at a corner. The

possibilities that have succeeded are (44), which is regular, and (3,42,6)
and (32,62), which are semi-regular.

3 POLYGONS AT A CORNER

Now we need three angles of regular polygons that add up to 360.

There are a lot of cases and the lazy thing to do is to get rid of many of
these cases before we end up working too hard.

Lets suppose that one of the three regular polygons is an equilateral

triangle. We are going to draw a figure and explore a little. Our
intention is to find out more about what the other two polygons have
to be, something more than just that the angles must add up to 300.
So we start out drawing the beginnings of a figure:

a-gon a-gon

b-gon P b-gon P O
x-gon
Figure 76. R

We draw an equilateral triangle and another edge of tiling coming out

of one of the vertices. On each side of the edge will be a regular
polygon, one with a sides on one side of that edge and one with b sides
on the other. Wait a minute! If this is to be a semi-regular tiling, that

96 PART 3 - MATH TRAILS

edge coming out is too longmuch too long. It must be the same
length as the sides of the triangle. After all, each side is a regular
polygon. We correct and expand our figure. At P, the end of that edge
sticking out, another triangle has to begin, because all vertices have to
look alike.

So we have drawn a triangle at P, with its other

vertices at Q and R, and there must be one
additional edge coming out of each of Q and R.
Now the question is: What is the outer
polygon whose edge is the line segment
between Q and R? Because of the corner at Q,
it must be a b-gon, and because of the corner
at R, it must be an a-gon! So the only
(3,122)
possibility is that a = b! If you have three
Figure 77.
polygons at each corner of a semi-regular
tiling and one is a triangle, the other two must have the same number
of sides! That fact is going to save us a lot of work. It means that if one
polygon is a triangle, so that it takes care of 60, there are only 300 left
to go so the other two polygons must each have angles of 150, which
means they are 12-gons (dodecagons, if you prefer). So we have only
one candidate for a semi-regular tiling with three polygons at each
corner, one a triangle: (3,122).

Does one of the polygons have to be a triangle, clearly not? If all three
polygons were the same then each would have 120 angles. That would
make for a tiling of three hexagons meeting at each cornerthe regular
bathroom tiling pattern. But if three angles add up to 360 and they are
not all alike, at least one has to be smaller than 120. That means the
smallest angle, if it is not 60, is either 108 (from a regular pentagon),

MATH TRAILS - PART 3 97

or 90 (from a square). By exactly the same argument we used with the
triangle, if one figure were a pentagon then the other two would have
to be regular polygons with the same number of sides. This means that
252 have to be shared by the two, so each would have to have angles
of 126. But 126 does not appear on our list of possible angles in a
regular polygon, so this case is out. This leaves the possibility that one
is a square. The other two angles would have to add up to 360 90 =
270. One way to do this is with two 135-angles, which means two
8-gons (octagons). See Figures 24 and 67. We saw this tiling at the
beginning as our first example of a semi-regular tiling. The other
possibility would be a (4,6,12) tiling with angles of 90, 120, and 150.
This one can be done, see the figure at right.

Figure 78.

(4,6,12)

Are we finished? Wait just a minute, says the mathematician, if you can
have (4,8,8), you could have (4,x,y) with x < 8 and y > 8. What is less
than 8? Well 5, 6, and 7. Weve got the 6, that is the (4,6,12). How
about the other two? Ah, but they would have an odd number in them
(5 or 7), and we saw that each of these can only work if the other two
were equal, and neither (5,x,x) nor (7,x,x) is possible.

Finally, there is the regular (63).

98 PART 3 - MATH TRAILS

 (36) (44) (63)
Figure 79.

Yes, we are done. We have found eleven semi-regular tilings of which in

fact three are regular, and the other eight only semi-regular. Here they are:

(36) (33,42); (34,6); (32,4,3,4) (44); (3,4,6,4); (3,6,3,6)

(3,122); (4,82); (4,6,12); (63).

AMERICAN FLAGS
On many math trails, you will have occasion to see an American flag. You
can ask how many stripes and how many stars it contains. The answer is
13 stripes and 50 stars. Why those numbers? Because there are 13 original
states and 50 current states. How are these stripes and stars arranged? The
stripes come simply on top of one another, but the stars are in a more
complicated pattern. There are nine rows of stars, alternatively containing 6
and 5 stars, with 6-star rows at both the top and the bottom. Does this
pattern have 50 stars? Yes: 6 + 5 + 6 + 5 + 6 + 5 + 6 + 5 + 6 = 50. Why did
people choose this particular pattern? Well, what others could you have?
Take some time to think about that and come up with some alternatives.
You could have just 10 rows of 5 stars each, or 5 rows of 10 stars each. You
could have 11 rows that alternated between 5 and 4 stars, with 5-star rows

MATH TRAILS - PART 3 99

at the top and bottom. Of course, you could have 25 rows of 2 stars each,
but that would look pretty ridiculous!

How do we know it would look ridiculous? When does one pattern look
better than another? Why didnt they use 10 rows of 5 or 5 rows of ten?
Lets have a look and see if we can figure out what looks best. First we have
the existing pattern and then some alternatives.

Figure 80.

We wont draw 25 rows of 2 stars each!

I think we can see which one is going to look best. We want a pattern thats
as nearly square as possible (the rows of stars on a real flag are closer
together than the ones in the drawings). We also like patterns that are
rectangular or nearly so. What does nearly so mean? It means that
alternate rows may differ by one star, with the rows interlaced like the
current pattern for 50 stars. It looks like the way people prefer to plant
begonias or impatiens: A rectangular pattern is not quite as pleasing to the
eye as one that interlaces, but any of these is better than one that is not
nearly square.

100 PART 3 - MATH TRAILS

Well, what about a pattern like our current 6,5,6,5,6,5,6,5,6; but where the
top and bottom rows have the smaller rather than the larger number of
stars? That might be a nice alternative pattern for 50 stars if the length and
width are not too different. Well, try it. Can you get 50 stars that way? You
will find that you cantit cant be done! How do you know? Just wait a bit
and well show you. In the meantime just try it. Maybe youll discover why
it cant be done.

But lets notice that it doesnt always fail, it only fails with 50 stars. Try 32
stars, for example. You can have 4 rows of 8; thats the rectangular pattern.
You can have 5,4,5,4,5,4,5call this the out-in pattern because the rows
that go further out include both the first and last rows. You can also have
6,7,6,7,6thats the in-out pattern, which is not possible with 50 stars.
In fact, here is the amazing result:

It is possible to have all three patternslike 32.

It is possible to have just rectangular and out-inlike 50.

It is possible to have just rectangular and in-outlike 52.

It is possible to have just in-out and out-inlike 47.

It is possible to have only rectangularlike 30

It is possible to have only out-inlike 29

It is possible to have only in-outlike 31.

But at least one of them must always work. There is no number that
has none of the three.

MATH TRAILS - PART 3 101

Lets look at 29, for which only the out-in is possible. There is no
rectangular pattern and no in-out pattern with 29 stars. What is the out-in
pattern? It is 10,9,10. It wont be pretty, thats true, because it is too long
with too few rows. The only other choice is 2,1,2,1,2, , 1,2, which is
even worse. Now, lets get more realistic and up-to-date about the United
States: What would happen if we added one more state and had to have a
51-star flag? A rectangular pattern would be possible: We could have three
rows of 17 stars each. From our previous findings we know that wouldnt
look very good. And there is neither an out-in nor an in-out pattern for 51
stars! What a catastastrophe, as Jimmy Durante used to say. What to do?
See if you can come up with
something, which is of necessity, a
little different from anything we
have discussed, but that is at least
pleasing to the eye and close to
being a square. Here is one:
Figure 81.

What is the mathematics behind all this? How did we get the examples
given above and how do we know that at least one of the three patterns
must always work? Lets start with the rectangular patterns. For example,
for 50 stars we found a 5 by 10 or a 10 by 5 pattern. This means that 50
has been written as a product of two whole numbers larger than 1, i.e., 50
is a composite number not a prime number. Its clear that a rectangular
pattern will exist whenever the number of stars is composite. The pattern
may not be pretty, like the 3 by 17 possibility for 51. We have discovered
that pretty patterns have roughly the same number of rows as they have
stars in any given row.

When is there an in-out pattern and how do we find it? Take twice the
number and add 1: There will be an in-out pattern whenever this new

102 PART 3 - MATH TRAILS

number is composite! Lets think about this further. Call the original
number N, then this new number is 2N + 1. Now 2N + 1 will always be an
odd number. If 2N + 1 is composite, you can write 2N + 1 as a product of
two odd numbers, say 2a + 1 and 2b + 1. Then N will have an in-out
pattern with 2a + 1 rows, and b and b + 1 stars in alternate rows. Two
questions: How do you know this is true, and how do you discover
such a truth, anyway? One way to know its true is by algebra: If
2N + 1 = (2a + 1)(2b + 1), then N = 2ab + a + b. But this can be written
as N = (a + 1)b + a(b + 1). What does this say? That N stars can be made
into a pattern of (a + 1) rows of b stars each, and a rows of (b + 1) stars
each. If you alternate these rows, you have an in-out pattern!

What about an out-in pattern? This will exist whenever 2N 1 is

composite. Why? 2N 1 is again odd. Let 2N 1 = (2c 1)(2d + 1). Then
N = 2cd + c d, which in turn equals N = (d + 1)c + d(c 1). So N stars can
be made as a pattern of (d + 1) rows of c stars each and d rows of (c 1)
stars each, that is an out-in pattern.

It is impossible to resist a pure mathematical note at this point. For what

N would both the out-in and the in-out pattern be impossible? This will
happen when both 2N 1 and 2N + 1 are prime numbers. These would be
so-called twin primes (like 101 and 103 in the case of 51 stars). One of the
famous unsolved problems in mathematics is to decide whether there are a
finite number of pairs of twin primes.

How do you discover, as distinct from prove, when the in-out pattern is
possible? A way that often works is to use pictures, that is, geometry.
Suppose there is an in-out pattern, lets say with N stars altogether. The top
row has b stars, the next row (b + 1), etc., the last row has b stars, and the
number of rows is a. Draw it.

MATH TRAILS - PART 3 103

 b stars

...
...
...
.
. a rows
.
...
...
... Figure 82.

Original pattern

Now draw a second pattern next to it that is almost but not quite the same.
It has the same number of rows, namely a, but this time the top row has
(b + 1) stars, the second row has b stars, the third row (b + 1) stars, etc.,
with the last row again having (b + 1) stars. How many stars are in this new
second pattern? There is one more than in the first pattern, which is N + 1.
So the combined pattern has 2N + 1 stars. Each row in the combined
pattern has the same number of stars, namely (2b + 1), and therefore
2N + 1 will have been drawn as a pattern of a rows of (2b + 1) stars each.
But that says that 2N + 1 is a composite number!

b + 1 stars

...
...
...
.
. a rows
.
...
...
...
Figure 83a.
Second pattern

104 PART 3 - MATH TRAILS

 b stars b + 1 stars

... ...
... ...
... ...
. .
. . a rows
. .
... ...
... ...
... ... Figure 83b.

Combined pattern

What did historical American flags look like? The flag with 20 stars had 4
rows of 5 stars, the flag with 28 stars had 4 rows of 7 stars, and the flag
with 48 stars had 6 rows of 8 stars. The flag with 34 stars, as of April 12
1861, presented a problem. The number N = 34 is composite, but 2 times
17 would not be at all attractive. The number 2N 1 = 67 is prime so no
out-in pattern is possible, and 2N + 1 = 69 is composite but 3 times 23
would lead to three rows of 11, 12, and 11 stars respectively. Instead they
chose five rows of 7,7,6,7,7 stars. Could they have done better? They could
have tried five rows of 8,5,8,5,8 that is similar to the pattern for 51 stars
suggested earlier. Would it have looked better? That decision is up to you.

One more question: Why is at least one pattern of rectangular in-out and
out-in always possible (although it may be too long to be pretty)? We are
saying that at least one of the numbers N, 2N 1 and 2N + 1 must be
composite! In fact, we claim that one of them must be divisible by 3! Why?
Well 2N 1, 2N, and 2N + 1 are consecutive numbers, so that exactly one
of them must be divisible by 3. If either 2N 1 or 2N + 1 is divisible by
three then it is composite. If, on the other hand, it happens to be 2N that is
divisible by 3 then N must be divisible by 3and therefore composite. After
all, if you divide a number (2N) by 2, and 2N is a multiple of 3, then N is a
multiple of 3.

MATH TRAILS - PART 3 105

MOVING VANS
It wouldnt be surprising if you saw a moving van while you were walking a
math trail. There are many mathematical questions you can ask concerning
the process of moving. How much can a moving van hold? What are some
of the principles used to pack a moving van? What are the standard sizes of
the boxes that movers use and why were these sizes chosen? A question
with which many of us have struggled at home, on which opinions may
differ greatly, and one that can be attacked either mathematically or
instinctively, concerns moving objects (usually furniture) within the house.
Can you or can you not get the couch down the stairs and around the
corner without scratching anything? How should you get the legs through?
A simplified two-dimensional model of this type of question was the
subject of serious research some years ago. Given a corridor with an
L-shape with the same width (call it w) in both legs, what is the largest
object you can get around the corner?

The most obvious answer is a square that is w on each side. You push it to
the end of the corridor where it is ready to go in the other direction. The
area you got through is w2. Can you get any more through? Yes, imagine a
semi-circle with radius w and its diameter along the inner wall. Push the
semi-circle until the center is at the inner corner C. Now pivot around C.
Because the radius is w and the center is now at C, it will turn into the
other leg of the corridor. How big is this? The answer is about 1.57w2,
which is quite an improvement. Maybe you can get a little more by cutting
out a bit of a hole beginning at the previous center, lengthening the object
a bit, keeping the width of the ring at no more than w, and sliding the
pivot point. Will it work? What does this do for you?

106 PART 3 - MATH TRAILS

 C

Figure 84.

Suppose the floor inside the moving van is 90 by 120. If you have boxes
that measure 30 by 36 (forget the height for a minute), how many can
you get in one layer in the van? Try it and see. After you have thought
about this for a while, you might argue that the area of the floor is 10,800
square inches and the area of a box is 1080 square inches. If you are lucky
in how they fit, you will be able to get in 10 boxes, but youll certainly
never get more than 10. Its no trouble to get in eight boxesput four of
the 30 widths next to each other to make 120, and 2 columns of this will
fit easily into 90 with 18 to spare. Change the directions and you can fit
in nine boxes: Three 30 widths fit into 90 and three 36 lengths fit into
120. But 10 boxes wont fit, even though 10 times 1080 square inches
makes 10,080 square inches. The trouble is that while 30 divides into both
90 and 120 evenly, 36 doesnt divide either one.

Theres more to this kind of story, however. Suppose the space was longer
and narrower: 66 by 180. The boxes are still 30 by 36. Total floor area is
11,880 square inches and each box is still 1080 square inches. Eleven of
them would fit into the area, but two columns 30 wide would accommodate
10 only! And yet you can pack 11 boxes in this time: Fill one column with
five boxes next to each other the long way and fill the second column with
six boxes adjacent the other way. But it is not true that either 30 or 36
divides 66!
HA!
Figure 85.

MATH TRAILS - PART 3 107

Try this one: A trucks inside floor area is 8 by 15, and the boxes are 2.5
by 3. Whats the largest number of boxes you could possibly have in one
layer? (Answer is 120/7.5 = 16.) Show that it is possible to carry out this
packing of 16 boxes.

What are some standard size boxes that people use for moving things, and
how big is the inside of various trucks and vans? What other principles can
you think of that are involved in loading a truck? Have fun!

ESTIMATION
There are many times in thinking about a math trail when you want to be
able to estimate something: A certain distance, a time, an angle, an area,
or velocity. What might people think of in such a situation? Here are a
few samples.

Distance: On the one hand distance is a quantity that is difficult because

there is such a large range of measurements (from fractions of an inch to
many miles) in which you might be interested. On the other hand, distance
is easy because of the many different methods of estimating available. Many
people can show by using their thumbs and index fingers the distance of a
centimeter or an inch; they may know the distance of the span between the
tips of their thumbs and little fingers when their hands are spread out; they
may know the length of their arms; and many people know their height
(especially useful for estimating shadows). For longer distances, it may be
useful to know that the derivation of the word mile is from the Latin mille
meaning a thousand. A Roman soldier was trained to a standard of milia
passuum, a thousand paces or double steps per mile. Counting a hundred
double steps at a fairly good pace is a good estimate for 0.1 mile. (A Roman
mile was actually a little less, about 8%, than our familiar English mile.
Thus the Roman pace was about 5 feet.) For estimations of much greater

108 PART 3 - MATH TRAILS

distances, it is worth remembering that the circumference of the Earth is
about 25,000 miles, so that a time zone at the equator is about 1000 miles
wide. You can compute how much less is the width of a time zone at your
latitude.

Time: Because many people carry watches, this is not likely to be hard to
estimate. Some people can count a minute pretty accurately by saying a
thousand one, a thousand two etc., at a rate they have practiced. Often
they can estimate a minute this way to within a few seconds.

Angle: Most people have no idea how to estimate an angle. Here is one way
to prepare yourself for angle estimation: Go into the right-angle corner of a
room and put your right arm, say, straight out in front of you, palm up as if
you were a police officer stopping traffic. Line up the right edge of the right
palm with the wall on your right. The left edge of the palm should then be
lined up with some particular spot in front of you. Move the right edge of
the hand so that it lines up with that same spot and notice where the left
edge is now. Move the right edge of your palm to a new spot. Repeat this
process until your palm touches or crosses the left wall. If it has taken you
exactly 10 palm positions to get from one wall to the other then your hand is
90/10 or 9 degrees wide. If the middle of the 10th palm position is to the left
wall, then your palm is about 90/9.5 or about 9 1/2 degrees wide. An angular
width of a palm at arms length of about 9 or 10 degrees is pretty common.

This is pretty handy in guessing, for example, a possible identity for a

distant object when you have a view, a map, and another object that is clear
on both the map and in the view.

Area: People often estimate the area of a figure by thinking of that figure as
made up of equal-size squares and then estimating the number of squares
involved. If the edge of the figure is irregular, you may have to think of an

MATH TRAILS - PART 3 109

outside fragment in the square thats being counted as compensating for an
inside fragment that looks about the same and is not being counted. It
takes about three or four small shoe soles to make a square foot. For
curved edges it may help to know about a few circular figures: A quarter is
about (not quite) an inch in diameter and an eyeglass lens is about five
centimeters. An old-fashioned frisbee has an area of about 60 square inches
and a cookie tin lid around 40 to 45 square inches.

Velocity: Velocity is distance divided by time. Sometimes what makes it

tricky to estimate velocity is that distances tend to be measured in feet or
miles, and time is measured in seconds or hours. If you observe something
moving for a little time, you tend to measure in feet and seconds, but your
instincts for velocity may be based on miles per hour. By the time most
people have fussed with the conversion, they tend to have lost all interest
with the problem. The handy conversion to remember is that 60 miles per
hour equals exactly 88 feet per second. For estimations you can make it 90
feet per second if you prefer: A typical lively walking speed of four miles
per hour is the same as six feet per second.

While you are walking a math trail, a skateboarder or cyclist may pass you
and this presents an opportunity to estimate how fast such a person is
going. How do you do this? Here is one way: Start measuring time from the
moment the person passes you and pick a landmark (tree, bush etc.,) ahead
that you will both pass. The cyclist gets there in time tc, where t is time
(measured in seconds), and c stands for cyclist. The time that you, as a
walker, get to the same landmark is designated tw. Both of these are known.
Also there is the unknown velocity of the cyclist vc, and your known
walking velocity vw. How do we proceed from here? Well, the distance from

110 PART 3 - MATH TRAILS

the place where you were when you started to count to the landmark is
equal to tcvc and also to twvw. Therefore

tcvc = twvw.

Since you know tc, tw, and vw, you can solve for vc, which is what you
wanted to know!

Maybe you prefer a picture:

Distance Slope vc Slope vw

Distance to
landmark

Figure 86.

tc tw Time

The same mathematictics can be used if you are on a four-lane highway and
want to estimate the speed of a car that passes you in what looks like
inordinate haste.

FINALE
We remember hearing John Conway give a lecture recently. He wondered
out loud how to end it. He said that the way to finish was to stop. So he did.

MATH TRAILS - PART 3 111

REFERENCES

p. 7 Dudley Blane (1989), Mathematics Trails, ICMI Conference on

The Popularization of Mathematics, Leeds University, 1989.

p. 7 Blane, D. C. and Clarke, D. (1984), A Mathematics Trail Around

the City of Melbourne, Monash Mathematics Education Centre,
Monash University.

p. 7 Blane, D. C. and Jaworski, J. (1989), Mathematics on the Move,

IMA Bulletin 25, 114116.

112 MATH TRAILS

HELP AND SPONSORSHIP
The trail organisers are particularly grateful to the following for their help and sponsorship:
The Age
CRA Limited
The Mathematics Education Centre, Monash University
The Mathematical Association of Victoria (MAV)
The State Bank Centre
The Family Maths Project Australia (FAMPA)
The girls of Yr. 7 (Room 48), Killbreda College and their teachers,
Mrs. Margaret Hardy and Mr. Doug Fry
The Mathematics Diploma in Education Students, Monash University, and especially
Sava Agisilaou Melissa Marshall
Dawn Anderson Loretta Pote
Jane Ashby Evelyn Rak
Fred Brown-Greaves Angelos Siapkas
David Grundy Arthur Tsingoidas
Philip Knowles John Tucci

INSTRUCTIONS
1. Follow the Trail Map and Instructions contained in this booklet starting at the
State Bank Centre.
2. An answer sheet will be provided at the State Bank Centre on completion of
the Trail.
3. Successful completion is defined as making a good attempt at all the questions
(excluding Challenge Questions) up to and including those at Flinders Street
Station. Please complete the rest if you have the energy!
4. Participants must return to the State Bank Centre to establish their Successful
Completion and for the award of badges and certificates.
5. Trails will not be issued after 2.30 pm and participants must be back at the State
Bank Centre by 4.30 pm on any particular day.
6. Please be aware of Road Safety at all times.

REQUIREMENTS
1. The main requirements are a pencil and preferably something to rest the booklet
on when writing.
2. A calculator, although not essential, will be helpful, especially for the Challenge
Questions. It is quite possible, however, to complete the basic trail without the
help of a calculator.

ii MATH TRAILS A MATHEMATICS TRAIL AROUND THE CITY OF MELBOURNE

INTRODUCTION
The idea of producing a Mathematics Trail Around the City of Melbourne
as part of the ANZAAS Festival of Science has grown out of some earlier
work carried out by the authors for the 1984 Mathematics Association of
Victoria (MAV) Conference at Monash University. The concept of
producing Mathematics Trails has been explored as a way of developing an
appreciation and enjoyment of mathematics in everyday situations, usually
to complement work in the classroom. There is no record of one having
been produced for parents and families and indeed there have been very
few for children. This trail may, therefore, be a world first and one of the
last great challenges!

By not tying this trail to any particular age range or to any subsequent
work in school, some design difficulties arose which we hope we have
overcome. The trainee mathematics teachers from Monash University who
helped to design and prepare the material, the children and the teachers
who trialled it, and the authors have all enjoyed themselves and have
learned something more, both of mathematics and of Melbourne. We
hope you do the same.
Happy Maths Trailing!

Dudley Blane & Doug Clarke

A MATHEMATICS TRAIL AROUND THE CITY OF MELBOURNE MATH TRAILS 1

A. STATE BANK CENTRE
From the State Bank Centre cross Bourke St and then
Elizabeth St carefully so that you are on the corner
diagonally opposite the State Bank Centre and look
back at it.

1. Without calculating write down a quick estimate of the

number of small windows you can see in the side of
the tower facing you. A1

2. Now calculate the number of windows.

(Hint: Count how many there are in each row and the
number of floors.)
A2

3. A window cleaner takes 1/4 hour to clean each

window. If the cleaner works for 8 hours each day, 5
days per week, how many weeks will it take to clean
all the small windows on the building? A3

B. GENERAL POST OFFICE (GPO)OUTSIDE

Walk about 50 metres up Elizabeth St (north) and find
the stamp machines outside the GPO at the top of the
steps. The one on the left takes coins up to 50c, (1, 2,
5, 10, 20, 50). To be able to purchase the lowest value
stamp provided by this machine, calculate:

1. the greatest number of coins you could use B1

2. the least number of coins you need to use

B2

2 MATH TRAILS A MATHEMATICS TRAIL AROUND THE CITY OF MELBOURNE

 3. In how many different ways could you put coins to
the value of 10c into the machine?
B3
4. On your left beside the machine you will see details of
posting times. If you post a letter to Perth on a
Tuesday at 5.00 pm, would you expect it to arrive on
the next working day?
B4

5. If you post a letter to Sydney at the same time, will

that one arrive on the next working day?

C. GENERAL POST OFFICEINSIDE B5

Enter the GPO building from Elizabeth Street. On

your right is the Daily Weather Report. From this:

1. What is the rainfall for Melbourne so far this year,

in millimetres?
C1

2. Is this above or below average for the past 129 years?

C2

3. Estimate the average monthly rainfall so far this year.

C3

4. If rain continues to fall at the same rate for the rest of

the year, estimate the total rainfall for this year.

C4

A MATHEMATICS TRAIL AROUND THE CITY OF MELBOURNE MATH TRAILS 3

5. What might cause your answer to be different from
the actual answer?
C5
The River Report is also on this wall. From the
information given calculate:

6. The height of the Murray River at Bringenbrong.

(NB. Use another town on the Murray River if the
C6
Bringenbrong figures are not available.)

7. How far, in metres, does the Murray have to rise at the

town you used before it floods?
C7
*CHALLENGE QUESTION*
If the change in the height of the river for the past
24 hours continued at the same rate for some time,
calculate how long it would be before the river
CQa
a. floods (if change is positive)

b. dries up (if change is negative)

Moving further into the GPO from the entrance, you CQb
will see hundreds of small private mail boxes on your
left. Look at the top five rows on Board A. If we use a
co-ordinate system with 1 to 36 along the bottom and
1 to 4 up the left hand edge, then Box 5A is at
position (1, 1).

8. What box is at (17, 3)?

C8

4 MATH TRAILS A MATHEMATICS TRAIL AROUND THE CITY OF MELBOURNE

 9. Give the co-ordinates of Box 27A.

Leave the GPO by the same door and walk down

C9
Elizabeth Street and enter the Bourke Street Mall.
Re-enter the GPO through the Mall entrance. In the
passage there is a plaque on your right.

10. Assuming that Victoria is 150 years in 1985, calculate

how old the State of Victoria was when the Postal Hall
was established? C10

Behind you is a painting of the only English Captain

who came to Australia and failed to take a wicket or
score a run.

11. Write down his name.

C11
D. BOURKE STREET MALL
Go down the steps into the Bourke Street Mall and
walk past the David Jones Store. Move to the front of
K-K-K-Katies, watching carefully for trams. Find a
circular pattern in the paving.

1. How wide across the middle is the smallest circle in

brick widths? (This is called the diameter (D).) D=

D1

2. Using the same units, calculate the distance around

the outside of the circle (the circumference (C).) C=

D2

A MATHEMATICS TRAIL AROUND THE CITY OF MELBOURNE MATH TRAILS 5

3. Divide C by D and give an approximate answer.
CD=
D3

4. Move out three rings and take the same measurements

for the bigger circle. D=

D4

5. Work out C divided by D again CD=

D5

6. Do you think all the circles would have approximately

the same value for CD=

D6

7. Write down what we call this value and the Greek

letter used to represent it.

D7
E. SWANSTON STREET AND THE CITY SQUARE
1. Cross the Mall at the lights and then cross Swanston
Street. Walk down Swanston Street towards Flinders
Street Station. As you walk, try to locate the exact
single spot from where the photographs shown on the
next page were taken. (It is within this 300-metre
stretch of pavement.) Write down the name of the
object you find at this position. E1

6 MATH TRAILS A MATHEMATICS TRAIL AROUND THE CITY OF MELBOURNE

 Walk past the Town Hall, cross Collins Street and you
will come to the City Square. On the ground 5 metres
in front of the Directory Board is a Surveyors Plaque.

2. What name do we give this shape? E2

3. How old is the Victorian Institute of Surveyors?

Look for the statue of Burke and Willis and the stream E3

of water beside it. Time how long it takes an object

(e.g., a leaf) to float down from the statue to where
the waterfall branches into two parts.

4. How far did it float, measured in bricks? E4

5. How long did it take in seconds?

E5

6. Calculate its speed in bricks per second. (Hint: Divide

the numbers of bricks by the number of seconds.)

E6

A MATHEMATICS TRAIL AROUND THE CITY OF MELBOURNE MATH TRAILS 7

7. Is this faster or slower than your normal walking
speed?
E7

8. How did you work this out?

Return to the Directory Board. Locate the

Amphitheatre and the Reflecting Pool on the diagram. E8

Move to the Amphitheatre.

9. Look up. What shapes made by the roof struts can

you see? Write down as many names as you can.

E9
Walk to the Reflecting Pool

*CHALLENGE QUESTION*
Notice how the spine of St. Pauls Cathedral is
reflected in the pool. Similar triangles can help us
to make a rough calculation of the height of the spire
as follows:

Cathedral

8 MATH TRAILS A MATHEMATICS TRAIL AROUND THE CITY OF MELBOURNE

 Stand so that the tip of the cathedral spire is reflected
exactly at the centre of the edge of the pool furthest
from the cathedral spire. Looking from the side we
could draw a diagram as shown below.

Not to scale

Eye level
Tip of S
reflection

H Pool
A B

We say that these two triangles are similar. That is,

one is an enlarged version of the other. Now measure
in your normal paces the distances A, B, and H. (H is
CQc
your own height but with some ingenuity you will be
able to work out your height in this way.)

c. A=
CQd
d. B=

e. H=

Because the triangles are similar: CQe

S B = H A so S = (H A) x B

f. From this calculate S, in paces S=

CQf

A MATHEMATICS TRAIL AROUND THE CITY OF MELBOURNE MATH TRAILS 9

g. By estimating the length of your pace (e.g., 1/2 metre,
3/4 metre) calculate the approximate height of the
spire.

CQg
F. THE PLAZA
Leave the City Square, walk past St. Pauls Cathedral
and cross Flinders Street at the lights. On the corner
above the footpath there is a Plaza. Climb the steps to
reach it.

Look back towards the Cathedral (North) at the

Cathedral Spires and try to positions yourself so that
the cross on the front left hand spire completely
covers the cross on the larger rear spire. Without
leaving this spot, turn around 180 and face the 150th
Anniversary Arch.

1. If you draw an imaginary line from the top of the Arts

Centre Tower straight down, which of the towns listed
on the Anniversary Arch do you come to first?
F1

Rotate anti-clockwise until you see a tall building in

the distance with two blue stars on it. This is called
Nauru House.

2. How many sides does it have?

F2

3. What do we call a shape with this number of sides?

F3

10 MATH TRAILS A MATHEMATICS TRAIL AROUND THE CITY OF MELBOURNE

 Remaining on the Plaza, move to the corner nearest
the road intersection. Look down on the intersection
with the traffic lights.
F4
4. Count the number of trams that pass through the
intersection in five minutes and write down your
answer.

5. If this rate was maintained for one hour, how many

trams would this be? F5

6. How many would pass through between 5.00 am

and 11.00 pm?

F6
G. FLINDERS STREET STATION
Cross Swanston Street and move into the foyer of
Flinders Street Station. From the timetables find out:

1. What time the first train leaves Flinders Street for

G1
Werribee on a weekday?

2. When does it arrive at Werribee?

G2

3. How long does the trip take?

G3

4. If you have an appointment in Melbourne at 6.00 pm,

at what time would the last train that you could catch
to keep your appointment leave Werribee?
G4

A MATHEMATICS TRAIL AROUND THE CITY OF MELBOURNE MATH TRAILS 11

H. FLINDERS STREET
Leave the Station and walk along Flinders Street
(West) towards Elizabeth Street until you come to the
Station Booking Office. Stand with your back to the
BOOKING Suburban Country Interstate sign. Look
across Flinders Street at the Council for Adult
Education building.

1. When was it built?

H1

2. When was it re-built?

H2

3. How long was it between the two constructions?

H3

4. If the building had continued to be re-built at the

same intervals of every ( ) years. How many times
would it have been re-built by 1987?
H4
Continue along Flinders Street to the intersection with
Elizabeth Street and cross the road to the
Commonwealth Bank building. Look back up Flinders
Street where you will see a CLEARWAY sign. From
this calculate:

5. How many hours and minutes each weekday cars are

not permitted to park here?
H5

12 MATH TRAILS A MATHEMATICS TRAIL AROUND THE CITY OF MELBOURNE

I. ELIZABETH STREET AND EMBANK ARCADE
Walk up Elizabeth Street (North) and stop at the
corner of Elizabeth Street and Flinders Lane (West)
where you will see the Rialto Building in the distance.

1. Estimate the number of floors this building has.

I1

2. How tall do you think it is in metres?

Now cross Elizabeth Street and Flinders Lane and

then walk up Elizabeth Street (North) until you reach I2
Embank Arcade. Turn into the Arcade and walk
through.

3. What must you beware of as you walk through

the Arcade?
I3
At the North end of the Arcade there is an interesting
mirrored ceiling. Move onto the footpath under the
mirrored ceiling and above you is another you
looking down at you. This is your reflection.

4. Calculate, in metres, how high your reflected feet

appear to be above the ground. (Hint: The blocks on
the wall may be a help in measuring.)
I4

J. COLLINS STREET AND THE STOCK EXCHANGE

Walk about 10 metres further along Collins Street
(West) where you will see a public seating area. The
back of this area has some concrete pipes set up as
plant pots.

A MATHEMATICS TRAIL AROUND THE CITY OF MELBOURNE MATH TRAILS 13

1. How many more of the widest pot would fill up the
tiled area, assuming the seats were not there?
J1
Continue along Collins Street in the same direction
until you arrive at the Melbourne Stock Exchange. Go
in (quietly) through the doors and on your right you
will see a pendulum clock on the wall.
J2
2. Through what fraction of a complete circle does the
pendulum swing?

3. What is the name we give to the shape that is used as

a weight on the pendulum? J3

4. Look at the Stock Exchange Coat of Arms next to

the clock. What is the motto of the Exchange?
J4

5. As part of the badge there are a number of gold and

silver balls. Which are there more of?
J5
Move further into the building and look at Currency
Exchange Rates in the window of the New Zealand
Bank and calculate:

6. How much would the bank give you in United States J6

Dollar Notes for 100 Australian Dollars?

7. How many New Zealand Dollars for the same amount?

J7

14 MATH TRAILS A MATHEMATICS TRAIL AROUND THE CITY OF MELBOURNE

 8. Based on the information given, how do you think the
bank makes a profit from currency exchange?
J8

K. QUEEN STREET
Leave the Stock Exchange and walk up Collins Street
(West) and cross Queen Street and then cross Collins
Street. In front of you (in Queen Street) you will see a
clock with Roman numerals.

1. What is 9 in Roman numerals? K1

2. If this was a 24 hour clock: What would the hour

hand point to at 1800 hours (in Roman numerals)?

K2

3. What time would it be when the hour hand is halfway

between XXI and XXII hours?

K3

4. Under the clock are a number of parking meters. If a

car is parked at 9.47 am on a weekday, what time
must it leave by? K4

Continue to walk up Queen Street (North) until you

come to the RACV Building. This building has two
sets of doors onto Queen Street.

A MATHEMATICS TRAIL AROUND THE CITY OF MELBOURNE MATH TRAILS 15

5. Calculate the difference in height between the two
entrances. (Hint: Look at the blocks on the wall.)
K5

6. Using the same units of measurement, calculate the

horizontal distance between the two entrances.
K6
*CHALLENGE QUESTION*
The gradient of a slope is found by calculating the
difference in height (H) divided by the horizontal
distance (D):

Change in
height (H)

Horizontal difference (D)

h. Using your answers for (H) and (D) calculate the

gradient of the hill between Little Collins Street and
Bourke Street. HD=

Walk further up the hill to the Top Deck Flight and CQh

Travel Centre and look at the details of international

flights given in the window.

7. If you wanted to go to London and back but need

to visit a friend in Auckland both ways, how much
extra money would you need to spend on fares by
visiting Auckland twice instead of travelling to
K7
London via Singapore?

16 MATH TRAILS A MATHEMATICS TRAIL AROUND THE CITY OF MELBOURNE

L. BOURKE STREET
Walk up to Bourke Street, cross Queen Street and
walk down (East) Bourke Street until you come to the
Colorcode Discount Bookstore.

1. If the book you want had a Pink sticker last time

you visited the shop, but today had an Orange
sticker and normally costs $10 before discount, how
much would you have saved if you bought it last time
L1
you visited?

2. For a joke suppose someone had stuck all five

stickers on the most expensive book in the shop
(normal price $100). How much would it appear to
cost after discount? L2

*CHALLENGE QUESTION*
i. If the discounts were applied one at a time in the
previous case, what would be the final price?

CQi
STATE BANK CENTRE
Go into the State Bank Centre and ask for an answer
sheet to check your answers.

Make a note of the time

How long did the Trail take you?

TOTAL TIME
WELL DONE!!

A MATHEMATICS TRAIL AROUND THE CITY OF MELBOURNE MATH TRAILS 17

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18 MATH TRAILS A MATHEMATICS TRAIL AROUND THE CITY OF MELBOURNE