By -
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. For example, One needs learn multiplication table only as far as five times five using Arabic numbers. 
For instance, to multiple 8*7
10-8=2   And 10-7= 3     then   2*3=6
8-3=5 or 7-2=5
So the answer is 56



Source:

THE ARITHMETIC OF THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITIES

Dorothy V. Schrader
The Mathematics Teacher
Vol. 60, No. 3 (MARCH 1967), pp. 264-278

Comments

  1. Susan GerofskyDecember 26, 2019 at 4:02 PM

    Thanks Roya. I would like to see a more connected, in-depth response like some of your earlier ones, but this is OK.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

By -
Image
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 ownerđź’ˇ 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  unitĂ© 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?
Read more

Integrating history of mathematics in a classroom

By -
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
Read more