Siyu Sun Math History Blog

 I think it can be important to our students if we acknowledge non-European origins of mathematics. In the past years, we’ve been hearing so much that media representation of minority groups matter and there have been many stories of representation being meaningful for children growing up. The same concept should apply in schools, and students will feel much more seen and recognized if not all the mathematics is shown through an Eurocentric view. I know when I was younger, I was always excited to hear about Chinese contributions to modern math and science such as the invention of paper, gunpowder, and the compass. Learning non-European roots of math can create a more diverse learning environment where students feel more comfortable to learn and participate. It also opens up opportunities students to relate and share aspects about their culture. In regards to the names of concepts such as the Pythagorean Theorem and Pascal’s Triangle, I think it’s alright to teach them as is. The na...

       We did our presentation on the ancient Egyptian area of a circle. I really enjoyed the initial process of figuring out what was happening. They had this formula A = (8/9d)^2 and at this time we had no idea why or how they arrived here. We followed along the instructions of cutting off corners of a circle inscribed in a square and that went smooth enough. When it came time to find how they derived the formula from this method, we had a bit more difficulty. The supposed proof came quick enough, it was a lot of fun to bounce ideas off each other to figure it out. David brought up the ancient Babylonian approximation of a square root and from there, the proof fell together and we were happy.      Then the next class came and we realized we knew nothing! The more we worked, the more we were mystified by the math that they had done. We had so many questions such as "did ancient Egyptians have a similar method of approximating square roots like the anc...

ReFaey et al. (2019) had an amazing article titled  The Eye of Horus: The Connection Between Art, Medicine, and Mythology in Ancient Egypt  explaining the Eye of Horus and how it connects to what the ancient Egyptians knew about art and medicine. I'll mainly be focusing on the mathematical aspects and start with a look into the myth itself. The most interesting part of my findings was that there was so much depth in the Eye of Horus that I've never heard about before. ReFaey et al. go more in depth as well about how the eye represents parts of the brain when superimposed on a cross section of the brain. It goes to show that the ancient Egyptians had a deep understanding of human anatomy for their time. Horus is a god that was named in an ancient Egyptian myth of creation. He was the child of Isis and Osiris, the latter had been killed in a fight for a throne then pieced back together by his wife. Osiris became the lord of the underworld, and Horus became the hawk-god. Eventual...

 A ninth of a quantity is subtracted from its whole resulting in 24. What is the value of the quantity? x-x/9=24 Try x=9 and we get 9-9/9=8 24 is 3 times the value of 8 so x needs to be 3 times the value of 9. Solution is x=27.