Good morning. It’s Monday. We’ll find out how the National Museum of Mathematics solved a problem that had nothing to do with quadratic equations or exponential functions. We’ll also look at a gathering to remember Flaco on a beautiful day in Central Park.
The mathematical problem that Richard Rew faced at the National Museum of Mathematics did not involve real numbers, algebraic numbers or transcendental numbers.
“But it does involve geometry and spatial perception,” said Cindy Lawrence, the museum’s chief executive and executive director.
The problem was whether an exhibit would go through the door and up a couple of steps.
It was moving day for the museum, which was taking up residence in a former gym at 225 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, around the corner from its longtime home next-door on East 26th Street. The Fifth Avenue location is a temporary space that the museum expects to occupy for a year while preparing its new permanent quarters.
In its new pop-up space, the museum still puts the fun factor into math, with hands-on exhibits. The museum’s square-wheeled tricycles have been set up near the center of the new space. (They roll smoothly because the wheels fit into catenary curves that keep the axles level.)
A few steps away is a display with interactive screens. On one, museumgoers can play Pachelball’s Cannon, a video game designed to teach what happens when the trajectory of a cannon ball changes. “Pachelball” is a play on the name of the German Baroque composer Johann Pachelbel, who wrote “Canon in D,” the wedding staple that brides love and many musicians love to hate.
Showing off the temporary space last week, Lawrence explained how the museum had adapted design elements left behind by the gym, like a giant wall photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge. The museum added lettering to make the bridge relevant mathematically: “1,640 feet of pure parabola.”
The exhibit that was being transported by Rew, who operates a Newark company that builds and refurbishes museum exhibits, was based in part on Truchet tiles, named for Sébastien Truchet, a French priest in the time of Louis XIV. Truchet posited that squares decorated with simple patterns could be arranged in a seemingly infinite number of ways.
That sounds theoretical. The exhibit is anything but. It looks like a platform with model railroad tracks running between model evergreens and ponds built to scale, with two model beavers gliding around on the tracks. (Lawrence said that the museum opted for the beavers to broaden the appeal to children who don’t like model trains.)
No matter how museumgoers manipulate the tiles beneath the tracks, a mathematical principle keeps the beavers from crashing into each other.
On the way to its place in the pop-up, the exhibit first had to go through the front door and up a couple of steps that were — appropriately, for this museum — bisected by a railing. The railing was removable, but its four-inch-high anchor posts remained at the top and bottom of the steps.
Would it clear the posts?
Without touching a tape measure, Lawrence said it would. She is that good at geometry and spatial perception.
“Math skills come in handy when you have to get something like that through the door or you have to pack your car and you have a lot of suitcases,” she said, before explaining how she had squeezed five people, nine suitcases and three backpacks into a sport utility vehicle on a recent family vacation.
She was showing off a selfie from the trip when the train-track exhibit went through the door with an inch or so to spare. With a lift from Rew and his co-workers, it cleared the four-inch posts, and before long Lawrence was beaming as the beavers skittered around tracks.
Weather
It will be a mostly cloudy day, with temperatures in the high 50s. At night, expect a chance of rain, with temperatures dropping to the high 40s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until March 24 (Purim).
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Why these New Yorkers loved Flaco
They remembered the soft sound of his hoots. The piercing orange color of his eyes. The epicurean way he ate a rat.
They were talking about Flaco, the celebrity Eurasian eagle-owl who died on Feb. 23. He was eulogized on Sunday by several hundred people who gathered under an oak tree in Central Park that was one of his many haunts. Some were longtime birders. Some had not been birders until they heard about Flaco’s improbable escape from the Central Park Zoo and his life in the urban wilderness. Some were near tears.
The tree they gathered around served as a memorial, with drawings and photographs of Flaco, handwritten messages, stuffed animals and plush toys.
Nan Knighton, a writer, arrived at the gathering with a poem she had composed and memories of the three hours Flaco spent on the ledge outside her window on the Upper East Side. She said that those three hours had changed her life forever, even though, at the time, she did not know who he was. She figured he was an just ordinary owl.
Then she texted a photo to her daughter, who recognized him.
“Next to childbirth,” Knighton said, “it was the most wondrous thing I ever experienced.”
Jacqueline Emery, a birder who lives on the Upper East Side, said she had spent “hundreds, I mean hundreds, of nights” with Flaco as he explored the park. By contrast, Julia Hutchinson, an artist who lives in Union City, N.J., said she had seen him only once, in February 2023.
He was “just a little bunched-up ball of feathers.”
Then he hooted. That, she said, “was a really special moment.”
Jacqueline Simon-Gunn, a writer and psychologist who lives on the Upper West Side, said she was working on a book about Flaco as an allegory.
“He tapped into something inside of me, which I think obviously tapped into other people, that just made me want to live better, made me want to live free or made me feel like anything was possible and to dream big,” she said, adding, “It was such a celebration to see him free and experiencing life.”
She said Flaco had made her proud to be a New Yorker and prompted her to change her life and take bigger risks. “We are often inspired by heroes because of the way they live,” she said. “When Flaco got out of the zoo, he became heroic because he offered us the opportunity to find the hero within ourselves.”
METROPOLITAN diary
The boxer
Dear Diary:
It was 1981, and I was working at an office building in Lower Manhattan.
After 5 p.m., the door from the lobby onto Broadway was closed, and we would have to leave through the Irish pub to the rear of the building. This happened quite often.
Depending on the day of the week and the general mood, some of us would stay for a drink or two before going home. The bartenders got to know us.
In those days, I lived in Bergen County with my family and our young boxer, Sis. At some point, I mentioned Sis to Brian, one of the bartenders. He told me that he loved boxers and had them growing up but that he hadn’t seen one in years.
One Friday, I heard that Brian was going to be working a rare Saturday shift the next afternoon.
I packed Sis in our car and drove to Manhattan, parked in front of the pub and went inside to tell Brian I had a surprise for him.
The place was empty, so he came outside with me and I let Sis out of the car. Brian was thrilled. He was petting and hugging Sis with tears in his eyes.
