I Know My Calculus...

..It says You + Me = Us. It also says sin(pi/2)=1. I know, technically that's trigonometry, and the first equation is just basic addition. But what the devil am I talking about anyway? Table numbers!

Personal pic

I've mentioned before how Mr. Unicycle and I fell in love over a physics textbook and how I have a thing for nerds, so when it came time for us to come up with a ridiculously clever table number idea that no one had yet seen, of course we turned to mathematics. It was actually Mr. Unicycle's idea to use math instead of plain ol' numbers, and I heart it. The basic idea was that we'd number the tables from 1-20, but label them with mathematical expressions that could be evaluated to the numbers 1-20. (Note: NO, we are not going to make our guests do math in order to find their table. Pretty much everyone who's heard our idea has started having math-induced panic attacks at the thought. They are merely matching what's on their escort cards to what's on the table numbers.) This means that we wouldn't use an equation like "x+y=10" because who the hell knows what x and y are? Instead, we used things like trig functions, series, and my favorite, the factorial:

Personal pic

I've always loved factorials. Something about exclamation points just made math so much more exciting!

I bought the ubiquitous Ikea TOLSBY frames for 99 cents each and put the table number on one side and our "I Spy" activity on the other. (Maybe I'll blog about this, but my post would basically just be this post by Mrs. Meercat, because I totally copied her.)

Personal pic

Personal pic

There's not really a tutorial for these bad boys. I just found a gray and white polka dot pattern via Google Image Search aka my fave thing in the world, printed out 4x6 copies of it, and glued our equations to it. (Side note: you may have to download a program that allows you to type math-y junk into your word processor. I made Mr. Unicycle do it because he is used to typing math on his computer and already had the program {extension? add-on? plug-in? meh}).

Personal pic

Personal pic 

Since the frames are vertical rectangles and our mathematical expressions are, well, not, I knew we'd need to add something else to the frames to balance it out. I suggested yellow hearts because I love hearts, but Mr. Uniccyle wasn't crazy about them.

Personal pic--drawn by yours truly

As you can tell, I'm extremely talented at MS Paint.

He suggested I replace the heart with yellow numbers instead, which would make it easier for people to find their assigned tables--that way they could just match a number with a number instead of a bunch of Greek symbols!

Personal pic

Personal pic

For the numbers I used my handy dandy Cricut, some yellow paper, and the Storybook cartridge. I originally thought it would be nice to cut out that bracket shape (shown in my mock-ups) for each equation, but against the polka dots it didn't look that good, especially compared to the amount of work it would have been to cut them all out by hand.

Personal pic

We haven't come up with math for all the numbers yet, but that didn't stop me from crafting.

What's the coolest table number idea you've ever seen? Do you think these are too math heavy for our guests (even though they don't have to do any math)? And what should I use for tables 12, 15, and 16??