Math History Reflection （Duncan）

  If we were to acknowledge the non-European source in our classroom, one difference we will make as teachers is widen the horizon of our students. Since thousands of years ago the knowledge of math rely on the contribution of different people around the world, even long before University was a thing.     Throughout the years different culture and civilisation has shaped the Mathematics we teach. A singular Eurocentric view on Mathematics in classrooms undermines the contribution that came before us. Acknowledging non-European sources not only “give     credit” or “recognise” the contribution made by other’s but also introduce a different perspective on the same Math we teach nowadays.     The naming of this theorem could mis-led people to believe the Mathematical concept was discovered or invented by the person named after. In many cases, it may not be true. Take Pythagoras as an example. Egyptian was known to use 3, 4, 5 triangles in their ...

  In this assignment, my groupmates and I worked on reconstructing the Egyptian approximation formula for a circular. As seen in the figure below, it is intuitive to conclude the inscribe circle in a square with side length d is (7/9*d)^2. However, it is different than the Egyptian way of approximating it (just by a little) – (8/9*d)^2. It is not until we use Babylonian’s way of approximating square root then we figured out. As an extension, we wanted to approximate the volume of a sphere inscribed in a cube. At first we found our approximation pretty off, as we just trimmed off the canners of the cube. We then tried a more complicated way of trimming the cube to obtained a much more accurate approximation of the volume of the sphere. We also dig deeper into other hypothesises on how the Egyptian came up with the “formula” of A = (8/9*d)^2. I personally really enjoy taking a simple topic, at least in modern day standard, and explore the sophisticate nature of it. In this case it is...

  The most common story around the eye of Horus is that Horou’s eyes were disassembled by his opponent Seth and later reassembled by Thoth. However, Horus didn’t take the reassembled eyes but gave it to his father as his third eye– The God of the Dead. This move allowed the eye of Horus to became the symbol of light, hope and healing.     While each six parts of the eye are associated with the 6 unit fractions, each part are also associated with a particular sense. Those are sense of touch, taste, hearing thought, sight, and smell. If we were to add all the fractions together we would only get 63/64. One version is the believe of the missing 1/64 is associated with the “sixth sense”.     Upon my research, I came across the eye of Ra. The eye of Horus and the eye of Ra are very similar in terms of appearance. However, they have different meaning/symbolism. While the eye of Ra only protects royal member, the eye of Horus protects everyone. As the word “Ra” means s...