From personal dream to national scene: The creation of the National Museum of Mathematics

The big result of an initially tiny calculation, the National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) can trace its origins back to a visit by Glen Whitney to the Goudreau Museum of Mathematics in Art and Science on Long Island. At the time, Whitney, who holds a PhD in applied mathematics from UCLA, was working as a researcher at a hedge fund. When he learned a few years later that the Goudreau had closed, the news sent him on a singular mission that led ultimately to the creation of the only math museum in North America.

MoMath opened its doors in Manhattan this past December, with Whitney as its executive director. Its 30-plus exhibits range from a square-wheeled tricycle to interactive cameras that explore video feedback loops and a video floor display that will soon respond to apps written by the public. The museum also runs a traveling exhibition and offers ‘math walking tours’ through the neighborhood. Besides the Goudreau, the main models for the MoMath were the Exploratorium in San Francisco and the Mathematikum in Giessen, Germany.

Attendance so far has exceeded expectations, Whitney says. Visitors run the gamut from ‘people who say, ‘I love math, and I’ve been dying for this place to open,’ to others who say, ‘I am antimath, but I was curious.’' For Whitney, ‘bringing those groups together, and getting them to interact and to talk about some of the ideas and phenomena they experience at the museum is like a dream come true.’

Physics Today‘s Toni Feder spoke with Whitney about how he ended up in the museum business, how MoMath came about, and how he hopes the museum will help change attitudes toward math. For hours and programs at the museum, visit MoMath’s website .

PT: You did a postdoc in math, then spent more than a decade as a researcher at a hedge fund. How did your path take you from there to establishing and running MoMath?

WHITNEY: While I was still at the hedge fund I spent time working part-time for the Simons Foundation Autism Research Institute . I worked on developing one of the largest databases for basic research on autism. I didn’t realize I would find something that I wanted to completely shift over to, but I was definitely on the lookout for things I could do that would touch on people’s lives more directly.

PT: So how did the museum come about?

WHITNEY: Sort of by accident. One of my colleagues at the hedge fund said, ‘Hey, there’s a tiny museum of math, so small that you need at least 10 people to get them to open their doors. Would you care to be one of the 10?’ We all had a great time. The room was a riot of polyhedra. I remember thinking, ‘What a great country this is; there can be a museum about anything, even mathematics.’

Fast forward five years, and I found out [the Goudreau museum] had closed about a year and a half earlier. Fast forward another several months, and one day, out of the blue, I thought maybe it was not so sad that the museum closed, in that it was never really going to take off. It was the only museum of mathematics in North America, but it never sought to have something to say on the national level about how we look at mathematics and how we communicate it to the next generation. I thought there was a place for that, and that it was time to do something on a bigger scale.

PT: How did you go from an idea to an actual museum in Manhattan?

WHITNEY: My first thought was that there must have been a list of everything that had been in the Goudreau museum. I started trying to find it, and reaching out to people. I got in touch with Cindy Lawrence, who was a friend, an acquaintance. She is now the associate director of the [MoMath] museum. She got me in touch with a guy who had done a lot of programs for the old museum, and he knew people in that circle. We convened a meeting—the first one was on August 4th, 2008. At first, we were just a monthly chat group.

We started looking for remnants of the old museum. We eventually uncovered the whole story—they’d been behind in their rent, and gotten kicked out. Their stuff had been in storage at a former junior high school. But when they needed the room, they said, anyone who wants this come and get it. Apparently a few people grabbed a few things from the former collection, and the rest went to the dumpster.

So, we figured okay, we have met a lot of people; it’s time to do new things. We bumped into a guy named Jack Hidary who had been involved as an adviser to the first World Science Festival [see Physics Today, May 2008, page 25 ]. He said, ‘You know, it’s supposed to be a STEM festival'—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—'and they have a lot of trouble finding mathematics content. You guys should do something with them.’

When the possibility came up, it was Cindy [Lawrence] who said, ‘We absolutely should do it. I will chair the committee to do something at the festival.’ She wrote the RFP [request for proposals] for a traveling exhibition over the Martin Luther King weekend in 2009. The timing was dumb luck—we had had the huge crash and financial troubles in 2008.

PT: Are you saying you benefited from the financial crisis?

WHITNEY: Absolutely. There was nearly a complete drought of new projects out for bid. Because there was such a dearth of material, we had top firms bidding on designing a 1200-square-foot traveling exhibition, and giving us pretty good prices, too. If our RFP had come out even a year, 18 months earlier, most of those firms wouldn’t have bothered to bid on it.

PT: Were you still at the hedge fund at this point?

WHITNEY: No. I left in late 2008. I decided the only way to get this off the ground was to do it full-time. I was willing to take the risk. If the museum blew up tomorrow, I do feel confident that I am still reasonably employable.

PT: How did it go from a traveling exhibition to a museum with nearly 10 000 square feet of floor space?

WHITNEY: We had proposed a 1200-square-foot traveling exhibition. In the course of designing it, everyone was so enthusiastic, and there were so many ideas, that it ended up being 4500 square feet. A key early showing was at the New York Hall of Science. They have been like a big brother to us from the beginning. It’s a highly respected institution, so that put the exhibition on the map. We debuted at the 2009 World Science Festival. Then we started touring [as Math Midway].

The Math Midway became a powerful tool for attracting people to the board of trustees. The sentiment grew that if this is an institution that we wanted to take a place on the national arena, then it needed to be in a place that was a platform for a national voice. Eventually the resolution was ‘Manhattan or bust!’

We settled on a $20 million capital campaign, and ended up raising $22 million in 18 months. It was mostly individuals, because they have the fastest decision cycle. The Simons Foundation was a big donor. Google is a significant supporter of the museum, as are a number of financial firms, especially ones that use mathematical techniques.

PT: What did $22 million buy you?

WHITNEY: It bought us the renovation and built out the exhibits for the space we are in. And it bought our operating expenses through startup and for the first year. In terms of the annual operating budget, it’s hard to know how things will shake out.

PT: Can you survive on entrance fees?

WHITNEY: No. Virtually no not-for-profit museum in this country is sustainable on entrance fees. There are a couple of for-profit museums that sustain themselves on their revenues—the two I know are the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, and the Museum of Sex, which is right around the corner from us. For not-for-profits, the typical rule of thumb is that a third to a half [of the budget] is covered by operating revenues. The rest is so-called unearned income—grants, donations, fundraisers. There is no letup in fundraising. In late February we are hosting an adult math tournament. It’s a gala charity fundraising event, and was a tremendous success last year.

PT: What age visitor do you aim for? And who are you attracting?

WHITNEY: You can’t aim for all ages, because you end up sort of bland and please nobody. We have in mind a kid in the fourth through eighth grade, somebody who maybe likes math, or even not. During fourth through eighth grades, it’s tough to keep alive an interest in mathematics. There are social pressures. It’s not cool to like math. And I am not knocking the schools, but there is a lot of repetition through those years. So, we wanted to be a place that helps a person, boy or girl, and especially girls, keep their love of mathematics alive, or [that] kindles a love of mathematics.

PT: Describe some of the museum’s highlights.

WHITNEY: The square-wheeled tricycle is one of the most popular exhibits. There is a theorem that there is a road for every wheel. We decided to illustrate that with a square wheel. So these tricycles ride in a circle. The outermost wheel is the largest, the middle wheel is intermediate, and the innermost is the smallest. The wheels roll in lockstep, so that is a lesson right there. The humps on the track scale with the radius as well.

There is an exhibition called feedback fractals. It’s a bunch of video cameras that are constantly filming, and whatever is filmed is projected onto a screen. It’s easy to point the cameras to film that screen, and that creates a loop that produces the same image over and over at smaller and smaller scales, which is the essence of fractals. It’s a great exhibition for stimulating collaboration.

PT: Where do you get ideas for exhibits?

WHITNEY: Early on, we asked an online community of people what they would put in the museum. We collected a huge outpouring of ideas. When we had a meeting of our advisory council, we literally put all 400 ideas on the wall, each boiled down to a little slogan. We had a book with the ideas that people could read ahead of time. All we did that day was wander around, chat with each other about the ideas, and then vote whenever we felt like it, by putting up stickers showing different levels of like and dislike.

PT: How often do you plan to introduce new things?

WHITNEY: We are going to introduce about a half dozen new exhibitions over the course of the first year. And a number of exhibitions have a component that changes or refreshes from time to time.

We are raising money for a $1 million exhibit that is still in development. We hope to have it for our first anniversary. It’s called Robot Swarm, and visitors will interact with multiple autonomous robots. They’ll play with them, and see what rules the robots behave by.

PT: How does math come through to the visitor?

WHITNEY: The approach is experience first, ask questions later. For the most part, we are not putting numbers or equations in front of people. If you come away with a sense of ‘Wow, this kind of exploration is a whole lot of fun,’ and that engenders a positive attitude toward mathematics, then it’s mission accomplished. And then hopefully we have piqued interest to a point where people want to learn more. We have information kiosks at the museum that can tell you about the mathematics behind the experience you just had. But you are not going to learn the specifics of a mathematical topic during a typical two-and-a-half hour visit.

PT: What do you hope people come away with?

WHITNEY: We have to get away from misconceptions about mathematics. People identify mathematics with techniques—multiplication, factoring polynomials—more so than they identify chemistry with proper titration techniques or how to dissolve chemicals or whatever. They have a more conceptual view of other disciplines and a more skill-oriented view of mathematics. I would like to change this. It’s an inaccurate view, and it prevents people from seeing the beauty and joy and experiencing the ‘aha moment’ of discovery.