Figure this! The right arm of the Statue of Liberty is 42 feet long. How long is her nose? The Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World) is a colossal neoclassical sculpture in New York Harbor, designed by Frédéric Bartholdi and dedicated on October 28, 1886.
Artists, architects and civil engineers use ratios and proportions in their work. Similarity and scale underlie design and model building. For example, SECME students build balsa wood bridges, creating scale models to help determine weight loads and structural strength.
The annual banner competition blends the communication and mathematics in SECME. Students create banners based on the Olympiad's theme (SECME: STEMulating Minds), with our school mascot and the SECME logo. But before our students can create on canvas with colors, they first brainstorm on sketch paper with pencil.
Competition guidelines require banners cannot exceed a maximum of 72 inches wide and 36 inches high. So to doodle a draft of proportional size on paper 8 1/2 inches by 11 inches requires similarity and scaling to enlarge any picture. Ten by 5 inches is proportional at 1:5 scale to our banner dimensions of 70 by 35 inches.
Hint: How long is your nose? your arm?
Get Started: Measure the lengths of your nose and your arm in the same units. About how many times longer than your nose is your arm? What might this tell you about the dimensions of the Statue of Liberty?
Solution: assume that approximately the same relationship holds between your dimensions and those of the Statue of Liberty. If your nose is 3” long and the length of your arm is 24” long, then the length of your nose is 3/24, or 1/8, of the length of your arm. If your nose is 1/8 of the length of your arm, then the nose of the Statue of Liberty might be 1/8 the length of her arm. The product of 42 feet multiplied by 1/8 is 5 and 1/4 feet. But the actual length of Liberty’s nose is about 4 feet, 6 inches.
ReplyDeleteDid You Know That? Liberty has a 100 inch high replica in Orlando, Florida, one of 200 originally erected by the Boy Scouts of America in the 1950s. Poor, tired, huddled masses can see it before the I-4 onramp, at the corner of Orange and Magnolia Ave.
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