| On Wednesday, May 11, 150 New Yorkers created the largest-ever human bell curve, while participating in the MoMath Random Walk of Probability on Wall Street, an interactive math event celebrating the uncertainty that governs our world.
Participants gathered in front of 28 Liberty (the former Chase Plaza) at 6pm and were given instructions by Glen Whitney, president and founder of the National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath), and Cindy Lawrence, the Museum’s executive director and chief executive officer.
Participants also received a set of dice, a blank piece piece of paper, and a writing utensil. Starting in a straight line, with each round they would roll their dice to see how far forwards or backwards they were to go, and record the numbers they rolled on the piece of paper. After several rounds, in which the participants moved forwards and backwards in a kind of entropic dance, they closed quarters by positioning themselves in the rows the dice had designated for them. The result, as if by magic, was a human bell curve.
But the confirmed that it was math — rather than magic — at work by checking the average of all the numbers they had rolled on the dice, which plotted out the curve they had created while doing the random walk.
The entire event was filmed from above and then projected onto a wall in the spacious hallway of 28 Liberty. This afforded everyone a bird’s eye of the arc in which they each represented single points. Before the crowd dispersed into their own separate (non-random) walks home, Ms. Lawrence asked them to imagine themselves as the shares of stock traded on Wall Street, or photons emitted by the sun.
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| The human bell curve recorded from a camera up above the crowd, projects their image on the lobby wall in 28 Liberty |
The bell curve is embodied in countless, real-world outcomes, where it guides results like an unseen hand. It is also representative, Ms. Lawrence noted, of the meaning of the event itself: that there many ways to relate to math, and that they are all legitimate and share the common ground of a love for numbers.
MoMath is located at 11 East 26th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues. The Museum is open seven days a week from 10:00 am – 5:00 pm. For more information, please browse momath.org. |
