Roya- Math History

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.

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