Benjamin Banneker Math Room @ NAAM
Presented in partnership with Math Happens, Seattle Universal Math Museum, and the Benjamin Banneker Association, the Benjamin Banneker Math Room @ NAAM is an interactive experience with a variety of playful, creative math materials. Through facilitated play, children and families will explore math concepts as they have fun piecing together puzzles and playing games,
The Math Room will be open at NAAM every Saturday from 10AM - 2PM throughout the year. Discover more about the influential mathematician Benjamin Banneker while having and challenging your mind in the Benjamin Banneker @ NAAM.
The Legacy of Benjamin Banneker
Mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Banneker was born on November 9, 1731, in Ellicott’s Mills, Maryland. Largely self-taught, Banneker was a groundbreaking inventor who showed remarkable skill in mathematics and mechanics early in life. Banneker grew up and spent most of his life on his family’s 100-acre farm outside Baltimore. There, he taught himself astronomy by watching the stars and learned advanced mathematics from borrowed textbooks.
When Banneker took over the operations for the family farm. He devised an irrigation system of ditches and little dams to control the water from the springs on the family farm. Their tobacco farm flourished even in times of drought. The mechanics of machines greatly interested young Banneker. He showed his mechanical abilities by building a working wooden clock, at the age of 22. The clock, believed to be the first built in America, kept precise time for decades. Banneker used his mathematical knowledge to calculate the time of a solar eclipse. That knowledge was also useful in calculating longitude and latitude, methods for finding a place’s position on the globe.
At the age of 60, he was appointed, by President George Washington, to a three man team of surveyors headed by Major Andrew Ellicott, to survey the future District of Columbia, our present day capital. In his free time, Banneker began compiling his Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia almanac. The almanac included information on medicines and medical treatment and listed tides, astronomical information, and eclipses that Banneker had calculated. He published the journal annually from 1791 to 1802.
Banneker lived for four years after his almanacs were discontinued. He did a mathematical study on the cycle of the seventeen-year locust and became a pamphleteer for the anti-slavery movement. The discoveries and calculations of Benjamin Banneker were integral to the mathematical and scientific community. Much of Benjamin Banneker’s written work is gone, but his legacy and academic contributions are still with us today.
