Math Girl

Math Girl
Math Girl character
Math Girl Episode 3 cover shot Art by Lou Crockett.
First appearance	Differentials Attract (December 2004)
Created by	Lou Crockett, artist, animator, and designer Jesai Jayhmes, actor and director Veselin Jungić, mathematician

Math Girl is an animated movie superhero co-created by Lou Crockett, an artist, animator, and designer; Jesai Jayhmes, an actor and director; and Veselin Jungić, a working mathematician. The character made her first appearance in Differentials Attract (2004). In her normal clothes Math Girl is an ordinary student, a smart girl that wears glasses. When she takes her superpower alter ego, thanks to her superb understanding of mathematics, Math Girl becomes a super heroine. Math Girl operates in Calculopolis, assisted by her sidekick Pat Thagoras a young man who admires Math Girl, and professorial Big Math, the mayor of Calculopolis. She fights a villain named Zero!, an evil character whose goal is to rule Calculopolis by exploiting people’s ignorance of mathematics.

The ambition of the shorts is to accomplish two goals: to use a pop-culture medium to give a new view (or use) of well known mathematical objects and at the same time to enrich the medium itself by introducing mathematics as a subject. Following the medium’s clichés, the stories are based on the fight between good and evil, where good is a synonym for mathematical knowledge. The movies might be seen as a benign parody of both the pop medium and scholarship.

Publication history

Episode 1 – Differentials Attract (2004) Math Girl uses her linear approximator to save her friend Pat Thagoras when he was stuck on Square Root Mountain. The episode illustrates the use of linear approximation and the differential of a function. The episode was produced by the Learning and Instructional Development Centre (LIDC) at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C. Canada.

Episode 2 – Zero!’s Dis-Continuity (2006) When Zero! constructs the Sin T Over T Roller Coaster, Math Girl and Pat Thagoras use their epsilon-delta device and the limit $\lim _{t\to 0}\frac{\sin t}{t}=1$ to patch the hole on the top of the coaster and save the Big Math’s twins from a danger. The episode was produced by the Interdisciplinary Research in Mathematics and Computational Sciences Centre (IRMACS) at Simon Fraser University.

Episode 3 – Rationalize This! (2007) It is Pi Day in Calculopolis and Big Math is ready to inaugurate the Fountain of Pi as part of the Memorial of the Unknown Mathematician. Zero! sends his army of zeros to make pi finally equal 3.14 and to spoil the celebration. Math Girl and Pat use their BBP device to foil Zero!’s evil plan. (BBP stands for Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe formula.) The episode was produced by the Interdisciplinary Research in Mathematics and Computational Sciences Centre (IRMACS) at Simon Fraser University.

External links

• Episode 1 – Differentials Attract
• Episode 2 – Zero!’s Dis-Continuity
• Episode 3 – Rationalize This!
• Math Girl Begins, Education Notes, Notes of Canadian Math Society, December, 2007
• Professor Avatar, Inside Higher Ed, October 16, 2007
• Higher education for the high-tech savvy, The Globe and Mail, September 7, 2007
• Campus: Math Girl saves the day, The Peak, February 26, 2007