My take away from the Presentation and Number with Personality article is that in all cultures numbers have been more than just symbols of quantities, they are words, and connected to perception and emotion, social relationship and judgment. Moreover, visual representation of a quantity are also linked to the sound of number words. For example, head variant glyphs in Mayan culture we're as visual metaphor for the sounds of the numbers, or In China, the good luck/ bad luck numbers such as 4 and 8 are also linked to their sounds. It is interesting to learn about number personality in different cultures, but I would not talk about them with my secondary students. The reason is that, this topic might arise bias or judgment of people coming form different backgrounds and make some of my students uncomfortable, considering the multicultural climate of Canadian schools.
Posts
The arithmetic of medieval universities There are many interesting points in this article such as: 1- Greek and Roman educational system believed that seven liberal arts: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy are necessary for the education of free men to become good citizens. However, they had different ideas about the order of learning those subjects. 2- The arithmetic of business was called logistic and was considered different from the study of numbers, arithmetic. Logistic deals with numerable objects and not with numbers and was the study of children and slaves, while arithmetic was a liberal art for education of free men. 3- Nicomachus ( A.D. 200) considered the odd numbers to be make and the even one's to be female. He made distinction between divine number which existed only in the mind of God as scientific numbers which were numbers known to the human race and earth. 4- Robert Record’s method in 15th century is interesting
Dancing Euclidean proof. After watching the video and reading the article, I was thinking of how I can use movement to change the stereotype of abstract Math and facilitate math teaching and Learning specifically for high school students Do I need to be a professional dancer in order to combine math and dance? How I can stimulate my students to find a meaningful relationship between dance and math? First I need to help them to realize that dance requires the use of some mathematical terms and topics, for example dancers need math to count the beats, rhythm in dancing is associated with patterns, dance movements are combination of circles , triangles, lines, symmetry and etc. Then, we can work on creating some movements to help us understand and visualize some mathematical concepts like functions. For instance, we can use these movement for some common functions and even creat dance by combining them. Although, encouraging students to participate in the activities will be
Euclidean Geometry reading respond. Why is Euclid and Euclidean geometry still studied to this day? Why do you think this book has been so important (and incredibly popular) over centuries? Is there beauty in the Euclidean postulates, common notions and principles for proofs? How can we define beauty if these are considered beautiful? For over 2,000 years, Euclid ’s works were considered the explicit textbooks not only for geometry, but also for the absoluteness of mathematics. Even in modern times, several influential scholars have been sparked by the beauty of the work. Hobbes, Einstein, and Russell all praised the work–not only for its mathematical accuracy of geometry, number theory, and ancient algebra, but also for its beauty and power to show these infinite, pre-existing facts to the eye of mankind. We may have realized that the ancients and early moderns saw mathematics differently. Plato, Euclid saw mathematics as much more than a set of tools for solving practical pro
Pythagorean Knowledge in Babylonia Pythagorean theorem was found to be used by babylonian centuries before Pythagoras The Phlimpton 322 Tablet It contains a highly sophisticated sequence of integer numbers that satisfy the Pythagorean equation a2+b2=c2, known as Pythagorean triples. Babylonian Problem on circle segment:. The following problem and the solution were found on a Babylonian tablet dating from about 2600BC: Problem: 60 is the Circumference, 2 is the perpendicular, find the chord. Thou double 2 and get 4 Take 4 from 20, thou gettest 16 Square 16, thou gettest 256 Take 256 from 400, thou gettest 144 Whence the square root of 144, 12 is the chord. Let's write this in using algebra, with” C ” being the length of the circumference, ”c ” being the length of the chord and ”s” being the perpendicular. Thou double 2 and get 4 That's 2s. Take 4 from 20, thou gettest 16 20 is C/3. So this is C/3 - 2s. Square 16, thou gettest 256
Was Pythagorean Chinese? 1- Does it make a difference to our students' learning if we acknowledge (or don't acknowledge) non-European sources of mathematics? Why, or how? Yes, it is very important for our students to realize that mathematics has always been an important part of humanity and it is always the natural language of our world. 2- What are your thoughts about the naming of the Pythagorean Theorem, and other named mathematical theorems and concepts (for example, Pascal's Triangle...check out its history We have been discussing different topics that were developed in ancient civilizations. The Pythagorean Theorem is one of these topics. This theorem was named after Pythagoras, a Greek mathematician and philosopher, although we have evidence that the Babylonians knew this relationship about1000 years earlier. Plimpton 322 , a Babylonian mathematical tablet dated back to 1900 B.C., contains a table of Pythagorean triples. The Chou-pei , an ancient Chine
Ancient Egyptians Unit Fraction Word problem, September 23 As They might borrow a horse( or simply assume their horse was still alive) and do the math! So the first son got 6 horses, the second one 4 horses and the last one 1 horse. The sum would be 6+4+1=11, and they could return the horse they borrowed to its owner💡 Scholars of ancient Egypt (ca. 3000 BCE) were very practical in their approaches to mathematics . This led them to a curious approach to thinking about fractions. The Egyptians wrote all their fractions as sums of unit fractions because feel unité fractions had a good intuitive feel to them which dose not seem to be important in our schooling today’s! For example, if you ask a kid how we can divide 7 cookies among 12 kids, he/ she most likely will say that everyone will take 7/12 of cookie! the answer is true , but is it practical? Why mathematics learning and teaching has become so dry and non- realistic concept?
To solve the above ancient Math problem, lets do some translation first! “ The first field gave 4 gur for each bur and the second field gave 3 gur for each bur. The first field gave 8,20 more than the second. The some of the field area is 30,0. What is the area of each field? * “bur” and “sar” are units of field area. 1 bur= 1800 sar and 1 sar is about 36 square meters. * “gur” and “ Sila” are units of grain volume. 1 gur= 300 Sila and 1 sila is about 1 liter. As Babylonian numbers were written in sexagesimal we have some calculations first to convert 8,2 and 30 to base 10. 8,20( base 60)= 500 ( base 10) sila= 5/3 gur 30 ( base 60)= 1800 ( base 10) sar= 1 bur Solving this word problem, using our modern math, looks very easy! if x= area of first field and y= area of second field, we can have: X+ Y= 1 4X- 3X= 5/3 and then the area of first field is X= 2/3 bur= 1200 sar And the area of second field is Y=1/3 bur= 600 sar We can also calculate the yiel
The Crest of Peacock Chapter 1 In the first chapter of “ the crest of the Peacock” , Georg Gheverghese Joseph offers an alternative perspective of mathematics history. I found it interesting the way writer sees the importance of scientific and mathematics achievements during pre- colonial period, and how we must identify the material conditions that gave rise to these developments and why modern science did not develop in those nations anymore. He also mentions the wider issue, kind of controversial, of who “ makes “ science and it would be wrong to claim that generating technology and science is a privilege of certain generations. Existing of systematic biases in selecting and interpretation of history, specifically math, which has caused mathematical achievements in non- Europeans societies been ignored and devaluated. How Europeans question the significant role of ancient science and even the quality of proofs and demonstrations in other civilizations, is another issue that
1) Think for yourself why 60 might be a convenient, significant or especially useful number to use as the base for a number notational system. What is special about the number 60? How is it different from 10? 2) Then think for yourself how we still use 60s in our own daily lives, in Canada, and across cultures if you have knowledge of other systems (like the Chinese zodiac and time-telling system, for example.) Why is 60 significant in so many situations involving time and/or space? The Babylonian number system uses base sixty instead of 10.🆒 My first reaction was: what a lot of special number symbols they must have had to learn‼️ After a few minutes carefully exploring a Babylonian table, I found out, surprisingly, that they used only two symbols to represent numbers. ✅ They also devised place value system that is very similar to what we use in our base 10 numeric system.✅ Are there other similarities or differences ⁉️🧐 It seems that both “1”
Integrating history of mathematics in a classroom
Welcome to the Mathematics World :) Why teach math history I am a big fan of mathematical history because you get a sense of how difficult some things were, like determining the area of a circle, or concepts like line, functions or infinity! Who developed that math? Why did they? What questions were they asking when they were developing it? Seeing how different people approached these concepts give us an insight into how it is possible to solve problems. However, the use of history of mathematics in math classroom as a didactical tool is difficult and time consuming. After reading this article : https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B00n89L6TX5gWld6dW5pcjVHd2M I learned about wide range of possible ways of implementing history in the mathematics classroom, through giving examples under some interesting headings like: -Taking advantage of errors, alternative conceptions, change of perspective, revision of implicit assumptions, intuitive arguments -Historical probl