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Friday math movie: Donald in Mathmagic Land

By Murray Bourne, 25 Jan 2013

Here's a 1959 classic from Walt Disney.

Donald Duck learns how math arose out of music (the Pythagoreans), art and architecture (the Greeks), nature (the Golden Ratio gets a good plug), games (vectors, angles) and of course, science and engineering.

As the commentator says when taking conic sections:

"No matter how you slice it, you always get mathematics."

And a bit later:

"These are the doors to the future. And the key to the doors is mathematics."

In the 1950s and 1960s, science had a higher profile than it does today. I can't imagine too many animation houses producing such a video today.

So here is Donald in Mathmagic Land (27 min).

YouTube took down this video because it violated copyright. Sorry about that.

See the 5 Comments below.

5 Comments on “Friday math movie: Donald in Mathmagic Land”

  1. Philip Petrov says:

    I wonder why in my country the TV stations tend to focus on idiotic cartoons which are all in the form of "anvil falling on the head of... hahahah" instead of focusing on those classics. Don't get me wrong - it's not "new versus old" cartoons. They just skip the reasonable cartoons out there on the market and prefer to show the totally dumb instead. Only the national television (BNT) will eventually show something reasonable to the kids but that's all.

    As for "math cartoons", I remembered this one - the dot and the line:

  2. Murray says:

    @Philip: Thanks for sharing The Dot and the line - I hadn't seen that one before!

  3. Richard Seymour says:

    I agree with you. I think that more of these production houses need to look into bringing movies like these back. They're fun. They're informative. You would think, what's the holdup? Try checking out It's not exactly a movie, but there are a lot of videos produced by kids breaking down a lot of different math subjects! Just as interesting, I'd say.

  4. Stephanie says:

    Hi, Murray,

    We need more of these movies! That was part of the inspiration for my new project.





    Thanks in advance for your help,

    [email protected]

  5. justgord says:

    That is so awesome.. Donald in Mathland was the video that really hooked me on maths when I was about 9 years old.

    My son loves Minecraft, and talking to another math edu geek.. we thought that might be a nice way to discuss Volume. [ eg. approximating curved shapes with cubes by crafting things up in the game world ]

    What would Lebesgue do ?

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