Maths Craft Festival 2016 was a weekend-long festival held at the Auckland Museum in early September, celebrating the many links between mathematics and craft. The Festival combined eight hands-on craft stations with a series of public talks, and was immensely popular, even making an appearance on One News. Over 1,800 people visited the Festival, trying their hands at a range of mathematical crafts, including crocheting hyperbolic planes, building fractal sculptures, making Möbius strips and folding origami dodecahedrons. The public talks were given by mathematicians and crafters, and covered topics ranging from the mathematics of knitting, and the Four Colour Theorem, to fractals in art and nature, and chaos and the crocheted Lorenz Manifold. The Festival was the largest event run at the Museum in over six months, and attracted a diverse group of people. Such an event wouldn't have been possible without our major sponsor Te Pūnaha Matatini.

The positive feedback was overwhelming, with comments like “What a great event, our whole family has enjoyed it, from age 7-47!” and “Thank you for putting up such a cool event! Math is awesome”. What did people learn from attending the Festival? Aside from experiencing the “fascinating complexity and depth to all of the various constructions”, they were “amazed by how much breadth mathematics encompasses”, and have now come to realise that “Fractals are EVERYWHERE” and “Geometry is way cool”. And perhaps most heartening of all, that “Maths is exciting” and “maths can be fun!”

STATIONS

A range of stations gave attendees a chance to try various crafts for themselves while learning about the maths behind them. 

PUBLIC TALKS

We had a wonderful range of speakers over the festival weekend who explained some of the deep links between maths and craft.

SPONSORED BY: