Heesung Yun EDCP442

As it can be seen from the posts, Egyptians would have had a very difficult time trying to divide 101 by  10. Since they would have had to kept on getting smaller and smaller fractions. They had access to unit fractions, so they could have found out that 10 fits into 101, 10 times and the remainder of 1 could be represented as 1/10, but just by changing the number to 102, it gets more complicated since they would have had to find way to represent 1/5 using by sum of unit fractions with different denominators. Either way, they could not have arrived at the solution by dividing by 2, so it definitely was not an efficient method. Also previous to trying to divide by 101 by 10, I tried to divide by 101 by 11 instead and as soon as the whole numbers part was finished, it ran into problem of 11/2 which they would not have had access to, so the method does not work very well with odd numbers as divisors.    

 If we actually add 1/2, 1/3 and 1/12 we end up with 11/12, so we find out that 1/2+1/3+1/12 is just an Egyptian fraction representation of 11/12. As a result, we can see that the father never really wanted to give all 12 of his horses to his son, since there would have been one horse left. The sons can assume that there are 12 horses, and Pat can take 6 horses, Chris takes 4 horses and Sam takes 1 horse which adds up to total of 11 horses. To be honest, I do not see how representing fractions in Egyptian way can be more efficient than today's method. 

 If we start to question the practicality of anything that we learn in school, I believe that there are not many things that all students will be using in their daily lives in the future. For instance, very few number of people read poetry or Shakespeare and even less students will ever talk about Canadian importance of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. The word problems given in the classrooms nowadays, during Babylonian times and ancient Egyptian times are most often not similar to real life situations at all. However, I do think that they have their place in education. First, relating to the article about Babylonian algebra, I think that the Babylonian teachers did not have a choice but to ask word problems to test their students’ knowledge since they did not have the concept of unknown variables, so they could not set up an algebraic equation as we know today. Besides the ancient times, word problems makes it easier for the students to visualize the problems which helps students to und...

  First possible reason why the Babylonians could have chosen a sexagesimal system is that 60 has a lot of factors, so it was easier to express as fractions as we discussed in class. Another possible benefit of using 60 as the base for a number system instead of 10 is that it can save up space when writing numbers down to for record purposes. As we learned in class, the Babylonians used place values unlike other ancient civilizations such as Roman or Chinese, and their method of recording was not as easy compared to modern paper or of course digital. Therefore, they may have wanted to fit as much as number as possible within limited space, and using base 60 would have been more efficient choice than base 10.   In the modern society, there are several occasions where we use 60 as the base number of certain system. Most commonly seen systems are when we keep time there are 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute, and an angle in an equilateral triangle is 60 degrees...

 Three things that surprised me from the article is as follows: 1, Herodotus, Proclus, Aristotle Thales, Pythagoras were all influenced by Egyptians, but early 1900's mathematicians claimed that "the history of mathematics cannot with certainty be traced back to any school or period before that of the Ionian Greeks" 2, Babylonians knew how to solve quadratics in different way and knew Pythagorian theorem.  3, Indians were very well-versed in trigonometry especially sine function. 1, It is understandable, given that the belief of white supremacy was widespread during the early 1900s, that the European scholars wanted to claim that ancient Greeks who they believed were culturally and racially unified group of people to be the basis of development of mathematics. However, it surprises me that they could ignore that they decided not to look deeper into the records of the ancient scholars above which clearly shows records of exchange of knowledge as mentioned in the article.  ...

      To be honest, I did not like math when I was growing up. Growing up in Korea where good grades were the only and ultimate goal of learning, good math teachers were the ones who had the most efficient way to help the students to get good grades which often involved memorization and repetitive practice. I did manage to get good results in the tests and classes, but the dislike carried on even after I moved to Canada. One thing that changed my view of mathematics is when my grade 11 pre-calculus teacher told me a story of young Gauss who used arithmetic series to add all natural numbers from 1 to 100. I was not interested in the teacher’s other lessons, but I certainly enjoyed the story since I still remember years after. Even now, as a math tutor, I tell my students the story of Gauss every time I introduce them to arithmetic series which never fails to grab their attention and by the end of the story they have naturally acquired the technique of how to calculate ar...