Eco-friendly travel made easy
May 20, 2019
Art = Power
June 24, 2019
The numbers game
Words: Lungisa Mnqwazi
A group of primary school learners and university students have recently proved that maths can be fun, by building the largest level-3 Menger Sponge and setting a new world record.
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.
