Movie Project - Day 39: Donald in Mathmagic Land

Call me a nerd, but one of the things that impressed me while my wife and I were dating was that she could accurately recite 11 digits of Pi at the drop of a hat. When I asked her how she learned that, instead of her usual response of "in a book," she told me that she learned it from a Disney short "Donald in Mathmagic Land." Eight years later, I finally watched it. In English. While watching it with Erini and her cousins, I remembered watching it in Grade 8, Late French Immersion. It was a little easier to understand in English!

I'm not sure just how much Erini learned from this short, but I would have no problems with her watching it again. It covers ratios, shapes, and even iterations. The amazing thing is that it's not presented that way. Ratios are talked about using music. Take a string, pluck it, pinch it in half, pluch again, and it's a octave higher. You can continue taking half lengths and the tone will continue going up in octaves.

Such a simple technique, you would think it was around for centuries, and you would be right. According to this short, the Greek mathematician Pythagoras, who developed a theorem based on triangles which later developed into the cosine law, also discovered the mathematical principles behind musical intervals. I would have thought it went back further, but the show is only 27 minutes.

It also illustrated how math is applied to a number of games. Chess is the obvious example, but there was another one that surprised me, three cushion billiards. I've always known that billiards or pool involves force vector calculations and a bit of trigonometry never hurts either. Then you have the trick shots, which involve a bit more luck than anything! But with three cushion billiards, EVERY shot is a trick shot. It was just amazing to watch.

The final segment was the best way to end a documentary on mathematics: mental constructs. Every great discovery was first imagined, thought out in the mind, and then brought to life.

Nature also follows mathematical models to a precision that can only be described as perfect. Shells follow the Fibonacci series, there are a number of flowers that follow a pentagonal pattern, and static bubbles have a perfect spherical shape.

The only reason this short is not in our DVD collection is that I haven't found it for sale anywhere in the city. Or maybe I'm just not looking in the right places.