Siyu Sun Math History Blog

      To me, practicality in mathematics means that the math learned in useful in day to day life. Most of the time, it is something that is so frequently used or thought about that we almost forget that it is math. Examples of this is calculating which box of chocolates is cheaper at the store, or planning how long you can sleep in the next day without being late for class. When I think about abstraction, I imagine math that can't be easily modeled in my head. For example, this would be something like the n-th dimension when thinking about linear algebra. I think that things that were once an abstract concept to someone can become concrete as they become more familiar with the topic and develop a deeper understanding. I would argue that pi is pretty abstract until you understand that it is the ratio between the circumference and the diameter. The same can be said for algebra, as the steps would seem meaningless if you didn't understand why it worked. The difference betwe...

      I found  The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics to be a very interesting read. It deconstructs the Eurocentric notion that all modern day mathematics evolved from findings in Europe and Greece. I was aware of mathematical advances being made in countries outside of Europe, but there was a lot that I learned from the reading that I hadn't considered before.     The first thing that stood out to me was that the Ancient Greeks took a lot of mathematical inspiration from Egypt. Kline (1953) argued that there was no development in mathematics before the Greeks and that there was no further developments after the Greeks for thousands of years until Europeans started to make mathematical advancements. However, this is directly opposed by Joseph (1991) who says that many famous Greek mathematicians such as Aristotle, Thales, and Pythagoras travelled to Egypt and Mesopotamia to learn mathematics from these areas. There ...

      10 is a wonderfully easy base to work with when doing arithmetic. When I was doing questions on Monday in base 60, it was a lot to wrap my head around and I admit that I used a calculator to expedite my process. When thinking about when 60 would be more useful, I first thought about time. However, I'm not sure if the ancient Babylonians had a similar system to time as we did. Next, I thought about angles; I thought about 30:60:90 triangles and Pythagorean triples. I was aware that ancient Babylonians had some systems for geometry and angles. In line with angles, there are also circles as they divide cleanly into 60's. 60 is also interesting because it has so many factors, you can split it into many prime and composite numbers.     In our culture, 60 is used often in the situations I described above. Most commonly, it is used for time and we can easily represent seconds, minutes, and hours in base 60. There are 60^2 seconds in an hour for example....

     Thinking back onto my previous schooling, math had always emphasized the doing of mathematics. In secondary school, the history of mathematics was limited to the names of theorems or perhaps a one-of 'did-you-know' of something Archimedes did in 250BC. During my math degree, the history of mathematics was never a focus either, and classes stayed fixated on the theory behind it all. Even during the last couple of years of taking education classes (when we were told the importance of garnering interest in mathematics through examples of real world situations), application of mathematics was through the lens of that such as engineering, business, or architecture. However, I think there is so much potential for math history in a math classroom. It could be through a hook at the start of the period to get the class's attention, a longer research project, or can even become the reason a student starts to become more aware and interested in mathematics as a whole. Sometimes...