Graph the Grid
Celebrate NYC with MoMath!
Graph the Grid has been extended!
Due to popular demand, this fun activity will remain available — don’t miss your chance to help create the largest human parabola ever to grace the streets of Manhattan (and to points north, including the Bronx, Westchester, and Connecticut).
We’re taking it to the streets! Join your fellow New Yorkers this spring for a fun, socially-distanced MathHappening event. Help create a human graph across the Manhattan grid by becoming a point along an elegant parabolic curve. Share your location on social media and watch the magic unfold as together we build a human-scale graph of this quaint quadratic function. Brought to you through the joint efforts of MoMath, the nation’s only museum of math, and Mathigon, creator of innovative new online math curricula, this event promises to provide a moment of collaboration and community for all. You can participate at your own pace and leisure.
This is an in-person, socially-distanced activity throughout Manhattan and to points north, including the Bronx, Westchester, and Connecticut. To those in Hell’s Kitchen, the Theater District, Northern Manhattan, and the South Bronx, we especially need you to help complete the parabola — join us today!
To fully participate, follow these steps:
- On a fully charged smart phone, enable location services for your entire device and your browser (e.g., Chrome, Safari). You can follow the instructions for iOS or for Android.
- Open graphthegrid.momath.org anytime after Saturday, May 1, at 6:00 am ET (New York). The webpage will be unavailable before that time.
- The webpage (graphthegrid.momath.org) will ask for permission to access your location, and you need to answer “yes” in order to participate. Note: if you decline to give the page permission to access your location, you will not be able to participate.
- You will see a map of Manhattan with a red parabola. Your location will appear as a blue dot, and the page will note your distance from the parabola.
- With your phone open to graphthegrid.momath.org, walk toward the parabola and watch your distance change! Remember to watch out for traffic, only cross roads at traffic lights, and don’t look at your phone while walking.
- When you arrive at the parabola, a “Pin” button will appear. Click the “Pin” button to add your location to the parabola. Your location will be shown as a large green pin, while the locations from everyone else will appear as smaller dots. Please note that, depending on your device or browser, it might take a few moments for your new location to appear on the map.
- You’ll also see a button “Share to Twitter” appear. Click that button to post a selfie on Twitter with the #GraphTheGrid hashtag and your photo will be added to our map!
- You can walk to different points on the parabola, pin yourself elsewhere along the parabola, and post more selfies on Twitter using #GraphtheGrid.
- If you have difficulty adding your pin to the parabola, you can Tweet your location with #GraphTheGrid and a valid latitude/longitude position (e.g., “I’m at 40.740307N73.990602W to #GraphTheGrid!”; click here for instructions on how to find your latitude/longitude) and a pin should appear at your location.
