The Thales Mathematics Museum opened in Aydın on 27 May 2015, set up by a group with more than fifty years of teaching behind them. It was designed after they had studied how it is done elsewhere — the Mathematikum in Giessen, MoMath in New York, the Garden of Archimedes in Italy and Mathlove in South Korea — and the museum says it adds to the stations each year.
The point is to make mathematics something you handle rather than something you are told. The stations cover both the mathematics of daily life and the national school curriculum, and the aim stated by the museum is to take the subject out of the abstract and let visitors touch it.
Mathematics teachers work on the floor: theorems are explained as stories and proved by reasoning, and visitors are encouraged to think their way through problems and find that more than one route to an answer exists.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Aydın as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 8.2 °C in January to 28.4 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in April, May, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in December (126 mm) and lightest in August (6 mm). Long-term means for 1940-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
