Help Build the World's Largest Sierpinski Triangle on Merion Green on April 21
The entire Bryn Mawr Community is invited to join Professor of Mathematics Victor Donnay on Thursday, April 21, from noon to 2 p.m. and from 4-5 p.m. on Merion Green to help prepare the world's largest Sierpinski triangle.
The triangle will be built with nearly 30,000 K’Nex pieces. The final triangle, which will be 90 feet wide and 45 feet across, will be built at the Wagner Free Institute of Science of Philadelphia on Sunday, April 24. The triangle is going to be made up of 6,500 smaller triangles. At Bryn Mawr, participants will be creating the smaller triangles as well as a section of the larger triangle.
The Wagner event is free and open to the public and is part of the Philadelphia Science Festival, which runs from April 22 to April 30, 2016, and includes over 90 separate events.
The patterns of the Sierpinski triangle illustrate important principles from the mathematical field of fractal geometry.
After the event, the K’Nex pieces will be collected into kits and donated to Philadelphia school teachers.
In addition to getting contributions from a number of organizations to help fund the event Donnay is also raising funds using the GoFundMe crowd sourcing site.