Last night our corn maze was featured on the Tonight Show during Jay Leno’s monologue–check out this video (at 1:20) to see our maze! (Of course, we missed it because it was past our bedtime…)
This week is our first Math Day at the Maze. We’ve got almost 450 kids ready to learn about how we make the maze and the math concepts we’ve incorporated. We will also have hands-on stations, presented by the Wisconsin Mathematics Council. Dave Ebert, the president, has put together a team of math students who will run stations for the younger students. We’re pretty excited–it will be a lot of fun. It’s a lot of kids (we did have to turn some away) but we’ve got lots of activities to keep everyone busy.
Carbon nanotube design for the corn maze–we’ll show the kids the symmetry in this figure, and we’ll demonstrate how we cut it!
We always like to include multiple layers of meaning within our corn maze. We like to have an aesthetically pleasing image that is fairly easily recognizable (this year it’s da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” aka “that guy, you know, the one in the circle with this arms out like this <insert realistic demo of arms outstretched here>, yeah, that guy”. However, our da Vinci guy is a cyborg–note the ray gun hand and the mechanical wing, not to mention the assorted gears for joints and a clockwork heart.
Cyborg guy is shown not in a circle/square deal like da Vinci’s, but in the planar projection of a hypercube (aka a “tesseract”, aka “what are you talking about?”) So, a hypercube is like this: you know what a square is, right? Okay, now a cube is just a three-dimensional square. Still with me? A hypercube is simply a four-dimensional cube. ( Here’s a little more technical explanation.) Very cool.
The gears are a nod to mechanical technology, especially the steam-era –aka Steampunk, which is also cool. We’ve got a little circuit-boardy stuff filling in the spaces on the lower right and mid-left.
The knot-like thing in the lower left is, well, a knot, because knots are mathematically interesting. It’s made out of a carbon nanotube, which leads us into the fascinating world of nanotechnology.
The theme this year is technology, ranging from the awesomeness of da Vinci to the steam-era, all the way to modern math and tech. Specifically the “GRIN” technologies: genetics (umm, because the cyborg is also genetically-modified–yeah, that’s it…); robotics (again, cyborg guy sort of counts); information tech (circuit boards); and nanotech, as previously noted (plus the weaponized nanoswarms employed in patrolling the maze for people cutting through the corn…)
More info and links to come on all of these elements.
Rex and I headed out to check on the maze–just wanted to see if 1) the corn was tall enough (yes);
2) Alan’s work cutting it was up to its usual standards (yes);
3) If I would get lost (yes). All very good signs!
Visit us at the Treinen Farm Corn Maze & Pumpkin Patch!
W12420 WI Trunk 60
Lodi, WI 53555
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