Understanding geometry in the dance studio

July 16, 2008

Jason Parsley, Christina Tsoules Soriano

We detail the collaboration between a math and a dance professor which began with the choreography of a geometrically inspired work. We chart a shared pedagogical experiment, undertaken in two successive semesters, which joins dance students alongside students in a liberal arts math course. Working together they experience Platonic solids both in a mathematics classroom and later in a dance studio. We collect feedback from the experience and describe its background and generalizations. We conclude with two open questions in human graph theory.