What’s in a Logo?

A sampling of logos from MTCs across the country

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In “A Problem Fit for a Princess,” Christopher Goff traces the history of the Apollonian gasket featured in the San Joaquin MTC’s logo. Many other Math Teachers’ Circles have designed logos to reflect their mathematical and regional identities. Here are a few of them:

	Bay Area Teachers and Mathematicians Our acronym is BatMath, so we designed a logo that represents bats, math, and the San Francisco Bay Area! The image is of a bat ray, which is native to the Bay Area. In our logo, the bat ray is reimagined as a vector field.
	Coastal Carolina MTC Our logo consists of MTC pieced together with CCU, in Coastal Carolina University’s colors of teal and bronze. The design in the bottom-left corner is a visual representation of the geometric series 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 + … and sums to 1.
	MTC Austin We think of our MTC as a bridge between mathematicians and teachers. By inscribing increasingly larger circles inside tangent semicircles, we created a logo that looks like a bridge. The increasingly larger circles also represent our impact over time, as problem-solving spreads from teachers to generations of students.
	Navajo Nation MTC The logo uses a Navajo wedding basket as a background. Over the top, it superimposes elements of the seal of the Navajo Nation, which shows the four sacred mountains at the cardinal direction points. We want to hear our participant’s pride in saying, “I am Diné and I love mathematics.”
	North Louisiana MTC Our logo represents the things we love, Louisiana and math! One of our members sketched the logo using an infinity symbol and the pi symbol to create a fleur-de-lis.
	San Diego MTC Our logo reflects our coastal location. The spiral was generated by dividing a disc into 12 equal parts and dropping perpendiculars from one ray to the adjacent one. This seashell-like shape is not only beautiful, but also gives rise to many interesting math questions spanning a broad range of depth and difficulty.
	SouthEast Ohio MTC The spiral conveys the sense of an open, inviting community that we hoped to achieve with the SEOMTC. The shape of Ohio in the O gives an immediate sense of place.

This article originally appeared in the Summer/Autumn 2017 MTCircular.