Counting on Some Math Magic

Glen Whitney hopes to reinvigorate a stodgy subject with a new museum

By Deirdre Donovan

Is it possible to take a frightfully complicated math problem and make it a supercool experience? Glen Whitney thinks so.

Whitney, president of the “Math Factory,” quit his hedge-fund job in Long island last fall and has devoted himself to creating the first national museum of math.

“Once I got this museum idea,” Whitney said, “it was a real hand-and-glove fit for me. Even though my hedge-fund job was exciting and fun and intellectually demanding, it was a little bit too removed. I wanted to be directly involved with benefiting people.”

With the museum’s charter pending, he has shifted most of his energies toward his “Math Midway” exhibit, which is essentially a portable model of his proposed math museum. Currently based at the Urban Academy, at 317 E. 67th St., the 25 booth exhibition features hands-on math activities and is the rough equivalent of a math

theme park. It made its debut last June at the World Science Festival Street Fair at Washington Square Park, and the exhibition will begin its national tour in mid-October. Following its travels, Whitney plans to bring it full circle to New York again, where it will be based at the New York Hall of Science in Corona Park, Queens, in spring 2010.

Whereas Whitney says that the Math Factory and its spin-off project, the Math Midway, is a grass-roots endeavor, he adds that his idea for a math museum was sparked when he learned that the Goudreau Museum of Mathematics in Long Island had closed its doors in 2006. Disheartened to learn that the museum had folded, he intuitively realized the important niche it had filled in the community, and what a loss it was to math aficionados.

“I owe them [the Goudreau] a philosophical debt, there’s no question,” he said. “I remember saying to myself, ‘What a great country this is. We have a museum for everything—even mathematics.’”

Whitney feels that his museum can go well beyond the scope of the former institution. No doubt his years spent as a hedge-fund analyst provides him with critical experience in the business world, and his undergraduate and graduate years at Harvard and U.C.L.A. give him a solid academic grounding in mathematics.

Whitney is betting that the time is ripe for his venture. He wants to change the notion that math is blasé and largely fixed to the classroom. Whitney sees math everywhere he looks, and wants to convert others to the idea that math is vital to everyday life. Pressed to explain, he can imaginatively link math to baseball, poker, traffic management, the lottery, the sonnet and just about anything else under the sun.

Ultra-modern and slick, the Math Midway exhibit seems to have ubiquitous appeal. The various booths include giant puzzles, square-wheeled tricycles, a simulated tightrope (with a mechanical monkey named Tess) doubling as a number line. All the booths engage visitors in hands-on math activities that are intellectually stimulating and fun. Although the lessons can be grasped by schoolchildren, Whitney notes that, “the mathematical content goes very deep.” Indeed, some NYU graduate students dropped by the exhibit last June and were mesmerized by the “Ring of Fire,” an activity designed to show how a cube (or a more complex shape) can be sliced by a plane of laser light to reveal other geometric shapes, and morph into a galaxy of stars.

Granted, Whitney hasn’t yet found a home for his math museum. But he has no regrets leaving his hedge-fund job. He clearly enjoys seeing people explore and discover math, giving them a fresh perspective on numbers, shapes and their shifting relationships. Or, as he sums it: “It’s that moment of, ‘Aha!’ That little discovery where things just fit together in a different way, and we see the universe slightly differently than we did before that moment. That’s the heart of mathematics.”

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Math Midway Exhibit
Through Oct. 14
Urban Academy, 317 E. 67th St.
To arrange visits for classes or other groups, email midway@mathmuseum.net

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