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Showing posts from September, 2019
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How did I find a magic square?!!!
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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?
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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
 Babylonian style base 60 multiplication table for the number fort-five . Here are some examples: 2*22,30 2*15 4* 11,15 5*9 6*7,30 7*6,25,42,51,25,42,51.... 👀 8*5,37,30 1,30*30 1,15*36 2,30*18 1,21*33,20 1,12*37,30 Interesting 😊
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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
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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