Crop Circles: The Hidden Form - Nick Kollerstrom
“For the Schoolchildren of tomorrow.
“Let us imagine a maths teacher who could not endure the thought that Art and Science should be separate; and who demanded that Delight and Wonder should be the guiding principles.”
So starts this wonderful book that gives the reader an insight into the mathematics of sixty crop circles, three quarters of which were laid down between 1997 and 2000. The crop circles are described with beautiful colour photographs and diagrams. Every formation has a name and its date of construction and the location are given along with a description and an interesting commentary. There are circles, circles within circles, intersecting circles, touching circles, interlinked circles not to mention triangles, squares, pentagons, hexagons, heptagons and spirals. Moving into three dimensions we find cubes and spheres and then fractals and interference patterns and a wealth of mathematics from basic shape, symmetry, rotation and ratio to trigonometry and hyperbolic functions. All this sparks the readers intrigue of the where and when of crop circle formation along with the much more baffling and philosophical how and why?
This is certainly a book to inspire your students and thoughts for lessons that immediately came into my head included - Can you describe the patterns made? Can you compare them? What features are the same? What features are different? Can you construct on paper the patterns made? How about in a field? There is an opportunity for statistical analysis of the dates, days of the week, and location when the crop circles were formed and an extended investigation could include the weather at the time. Another could be to investigate the crop circles formed since this book was written and update the statistical analysis. There are so many questions and activities just waiting to be investigated.
A really lovely book full of inspiration and fascinating detail about crop circles from the very simplest to complex moiré interference patterns. The author, quite deliberately, does not discuss any of the possibilities as to how crop circles appear, leaving the reader to further investigate if they so choose. It certainly offers a lovely way to teach mathematics in addition to promoting students' spiritual, moral, social and cultural development and a must for any school library.
Reviewer: Julie Gibbon, part time mathematics teacher at Hassockfield Secure Training Centre, Durham
Crop Circles: The Hidden Form
Nick Kollerstrom
Wessex Books ISBN 1 903035 11 2
£6.99
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