Twenty students of Jose Ponce’s have their real-world examples of pi projects on display in Life and Health Sciences 2.500 on the Brownsville campus.
“It started as an assignment for the students,” said Ponce, who is a lecturer of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences. “I wanted them to do something creative … and it turned out to be very good artistic assignments they submitted. They were very good, very organized and very clean and so we decided to display them to commemorate Pi Day, but to also show, you know, the rest of the university the type of work our students can do.”
Pi Day is celebrated on March 14; π is the symbol used in mathematics to represent a constant, which is approximately 3.14, around the world, according to www.piday.org.
Students in Ponce’s precalculus course created projects such as a Ferris wheel in a park; a stopwatch with the background of “The Persistence of Memory;” a surrealism painting by Salvador Dalí; and a Poké Ball from the Pokémon video games.
Marissa Medrano, a biomedical science freshman, said the hardest part of her lunar phase pi project was using a compass to outline the moons.
“I didn’t know if it was going to be too big or too small,” Medrano said. “That, and coloring it in because I used, like, a very fine-point marker.”
Of the 20 projects submitted, Ponce said Medrano’s work stood out.
“It was very special [and] very creative,” he said. “It was very colorful and … it [had] the necessary components [for relating to] a real-life event or situation.”
Ponce said the public should see the examples of pi in mathematics and in action through his students’ projects.
“It will show them how pi comes into play in all of the different math classes we have here at UTRGV, why is it important to include it … the application of it, what is it really, where can we see it in action,” he said. “So, this art displays [the] geometric angles that make use of the pi quantity.”
The projects will be displayed until the end of the first week of April.
