Exploring the World of Mathematics

We see a little square soap film form inside a cube. When one thinks of soap bubbles, math is certainly not the first thing that comes to mind. Rather, people tend to think about children blowing bubbles outside on a sunny summer day and watching them until they pop high up in the sky. However, those of us that study math know that soap bubbles have played a huge role in studying minimal surfaces; thus, I am interested in studying it myself. For the third week of research, I began investigating the soap films that are formed by platonic solids. First, the recipe that I used to make the soap solution is as follows: 2.5 gallons of water 1/2 cup of Dawn soap 1 tablespoon of Glycerin Second, I used Zometools to build the shapes that I want to submerge into the soap solution. For my first time examining soap films, I built the platonic solids along with a few other simple shapes. Before I immersed the shapes into the mixture, I attempted to predict the shape, but I soon disco...

My first task this summer was to create useful objects using Tinkercad. It sounds like a simple task; however, I spent a good amount of time pondering about what objects I can 3D print that are "useful." Eventually, I decided on building an egg lamp, which was inspired by Daenerys' dragon eggs from Game of Thrones . Daenerys' dragon eggs in Game of Thrones . Photo from Popsugar In Tinkercad, I used two egg shapes, the Voronoi design, and two cylinders to create the egg lamp. I partially followed a tutorial  as I was just starting to learn my way around Tinkercad, but rather than using a ring shape and a square for the bottom, I used a cylinder so that the egg can stand upright. This was my final result in Tinkercad. Once I was satisfied with how the egg lamp looked, I had to save it as an STL file and open it in Cura in order to prepare it for printing. In Cura, I am able to adjust the size of the egg lamp  and I can determine if supports are needed as ...

From a very young age, I have had a fascination with math. It was the one subject that I was always eager to learn more about and enjoyed studying. However, my interest in math does not necessarily mean that I was always good at it. Throughout elementary school, I had years where I struggled to pass math and I had a rough start in my honors math classes in high school. It wasn't until my second semester of my sophomore year of high school that I was able to finally realize that I needed to not only know what  to do to solve a problem, but I also had to understand why  I was doing the steps that I was doing. After this realization, I was able to thrive in math. Math isn't simply memorization. Math is its own world. By the time I graduated high school, I knew that I wanted to pursue a career that allowed me to further explore the world of mathematics. Thus, I decided that I wanted to become a high school math teacher so that I can obtain a deeper understanding of math as well as...