The numbers game
June 24, 2019
Shaping our girl-trepreneurs
June 24, 2019
Art = Power
Words: Lungisa Mnqwazi
The Lalela Project Trust, a registered non-profit organisation in Hout Bay, is fighting social ills with art.
A bunch of South African students may have clinched a spot in the Guinness Book of Records. Forty-five Grade 4 to 6 learners and 14 Stellenbosch University students have built what could be the world’s largest level-three Menger Sponges in just six hours.
The learners, who are from various schools in Cape Town, participated in the Standard Bank and Shikaya NumberSense Programme. Their fun attempt formed part of the 2019 NumberSense User Group Conference held at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa.
They managed to build a 1.8m3 cube, called a Menger Sponge, using a total of 18 048 tabbed cardboard squares, held together by 36 096 rubber bands. The Menger Sponge, first described by the Austrian mathematician Karl Menger in 1926, looks a little like a Rubik’s cube and its fractal dimensions are so loved by the maths community that building one is a complex feat.
