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Friday math movie: Donald in Mathmagic Land

By Murray Bourne, 25 Jan 2013

Here's a 1959 classic from Walt Disney.

Donald Duck learns how math arose out of music (the Pythagoreans), art and architecture (the Greeks), nature (the Golden Ratio gets a good plug), games (vectors, angles) and of course, science and engineering.

As the commentator says when taking conic sections:

"No matter how you slice it, you always get mathematics."

And a bit later:

"These are the doors to the future. And the key to the doors is mathematics."

In the 1950s and 1960s, science had a higher profile than it does today. I can't imagine too many animation houses producing such a video today.

So here is Donald in Mathmagic Land (27 min).

YouTube took down this video because it violated copyright. Sorry about that.

See the 5 Comments below.

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HTML: You can use simple tags like <b>, <a href="...">, etc.

To enter math, you can can either:

  1. Use simple calculator-like input in the following format (surround your math in backticks, or qq on tablet or phone):
    `a^2 = sqrt(b^2 + c^2)`
    (See more on ASCIIMath syntax); or
  2. Use simple LaTeX in the following format. Surround your math with \( and \).
    \( \int g dx = \sqrt{\frac{a}{b}} \)
    (This is standard simple LaTeX.)

NOTE: You can mix both types of math entry in your comment.

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