Picasso’s Bull – Not Just for Design Thinking

I came across the New York Times article on the Apple’s training program and its use in describing their design process. I hadn’t seen it before, but saw it also as a pretty good approximation for mathematical abstraction.

I used the lithographs 1 – 11 from http://artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/animals_in_art/pablo_picasso.htm and put them together like this:

We have shortened classes tomorrow (20 minutes) and I think it might be good material for a way to introduce the philosophy of the IB Mathematics and Math 10 courses. Some potential questions floating in my head now:

• How does this series of images relate to thinking mathematically?
• What does the last representation have that the first representation does not? How is this similar to using math to model the world around us?
• Can you do a similar series of drawings that show a similar progression of abstraction from your previous math classes?

This seems to be a really interesting line of thinking that connects well to the theory of knowledge component of the IB curriculum. I see this as a pretty compelling story line that relates to written representation of numbers, approximations, and the idea of creating mathematical models. Do you have other ideas for how this might be used with students?