For the last couple of years, Teaching Professor Andy Loveless has been leading Washington Experimental Mathematics Lab (WXML) projects in exploring curiosity through mathematics and visuals.
These WXML teams have been asking questions such as: "Which melts faster, a spherical or cubic ice cube? How does a water tank’s shape affect how it drains? What do wave equations, Laplace transforms, seashells, roller coasters, tangent-line art, and bending soccer balls actually look like when we make them visual and interactive?"
All of these are questions inspired by introductory mathematics courses here at UW, but lead to stunning results, which can be seen at a new website: https://sites.math.washington.edu/~aloveles/CuriosityLab/showcase-2026.html
Students began by choosing related rates or optimization problems (similar to those arising in Math 124), solving them, asking follow-up questions, and working with Professor Loveless to create visuals with help from graduate mentors Dora Kassabova and Bryan Lu. The long-term goal is to keep growing this archive with student questions, ideas, and visuals in future years.
There are also archives devoted to calculus-related 3D prints, based on WXML projects co-led by Professor Loveless and UW Math graduate student Michael Zeng, and an archive of older visual projects, based on a project co-led by Professor Loveless and Professor Charles Camacho, involving 14 undergraduate students.