What I have learnt from the course

I enjoy reading history and I have to say this is one of the courses that I enjoyed the most in this semester. To some people history and mathematics are the two most boring subjects and if you put them together it can be quite unbearable. However, this course taught me that mathematics history can be very exciting and fun too! It is all about how contributions from our forefathers which shape our world today. One gets to appreciate the discoveries and inventions of mathematicians and because of them, we get to enjoy a lot of things we are enjoying today!

One thing I also learnt from this course is how western dominance in recent centuries shaped our education system today. In today's schools, we learn a lot about mathematicians who made significant contributions and a lot of them are white males. Never in schools today we talk about Al-Khwarizmi, Liu Hui or Aryabhata. Through learning the mathematics history of the different civilizations, it helps de-colonize the math education in our classes. From this, students can also recognize the contributions of the different cultures in mathematics. Even though the math curriculum is quite rigid, I think we can still implement some of the topics we learnt in this course in our high school Math classrooms.

I think that we should spend more time studying each individual culture but time did not allow us to do that. Therefore, just like what Susan said the other day, this course should span across 2 semesters. However, there are a lot of things we need to go through in the 11 months so maybe we will just have to learn more on our own. I really hope that I will be able to incorporate some of the topics we learnt in this course into our math curriculum and hope that our students enjoy it as much as we did.

Reflection on our Final Assignment - Ada Lovelace

 I thoroughly enjoyed working on this assignment. I think that Ada Lovelace's life is a revolution given the social status of a woman during that time. At a time when women were not suppose to be in school, she proved that females could also very competent academically, to a point that she was one of the first people who contributed to computer science. Even though she and Babbage did not get a chance to build the difference engine, their ideas inspired a lot of people later on and made contributions in the field of computer science.

I also think that it is a very interesting idea to show Ada Lovelace's life in a video clip. For sure we can do it as a powerpoint presentation but it is more engaging to have a video and music so it is more like a story than a lecture. It is also very fascinating that up until today people still commemorate Ada Lovelace in a  lot of ways that I have never heard of. I think that this is something that can be done in our Math classes in schools. I think students can learn more doing these kinds of presentations than listen to lectures and copy notes. 

Final Assignment - Ada Lovelace

Our group consists of Matt, Zoe and myself. Below is the link to our "draw my life" video of Ada Lovelace:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11r9fq8ZYN3fp1VBWtcU23RsmgoG1JArr/view

An introduction to the mathematics of the Golden Age of medieval Islam

The first thing that struck me is that the Islamic world made so many contributions in science and mathematics but we rarely talk about them. And a lot of these Islamic mathematicians were actually pioneers in a lot of areas in Math. The modern word of algorithm actually comes from the name al-Khwārizmī. This shows the significant contribution from al-Khwārizmī to the mathematical world. One thing we can do in our classroom is to have a research project just on the life and contribution he made to the mathematical world.

The second thing I notice is the construction of a map of the known world back then. Al-Khwārizmī was a really versatile mathematician in the sense that he worked on a lot of different areas in mathematics. I was surprised that Muslims already knew that the Earth is actually a sphere and not a flat surface. People like Al-Khwārizmī worked on mapping a spherical world onto a plane surface. One can imagine how much information is needed and compiled to create this map. Note that in modern maps, the size of a piece of land on a flat surface may actually be very different in the real world since the world is on a spherical surface. 

The third thing is the contribution of al-Kāshī on the estimation of 2π. He was accurate to 16 decimal places and this itself is an amazing feat. He used perimeter of inscribed and circumscribed polygons to estimate the value of 2π. This is actually similar to the method done by Liu Hui of China. It is interesting that different civilizations with totally different backgrounds can come up with mathematical ideas that agree with each other. Some of these civilizations did not even have a chance to interact with each other. Using perimeter of inscribed and circumscribed polygons to estimate the value of 2π would be a very fun activity to do in class. Of course we will be using polygons with only a few sides so that students can get a glimpse of how the mathematicians of ancient civilizations went about estimating the value of 2π.