Heesung Yun EDCP442

 Although his work was first written and organized almost two millenniums ago, but schools have continued to teach it as one of the most basic and integral part of the curriculum. The article argues that Euclid's Elements is one of the best math textbook that exists and continue to will be in the future. I believe that this is due to the fact that it provides simple, understandable geometric features that can be extended and applied in more complex situations. In the Element, Euclid provides a propositions and gives instructions that are very easy for the reader to follow which makes it a good textbook. The beauty of his work lies in the fact that it is gives fairly simple and clear instructions of proof that are easy to be reenacted. Unfortunately I do not think that it is possible to postulate and define beauty from the standard of Euclidean geometry. There are other forms that are quite different from the work of Euclid that could also be considered beautiful. Euclid's work ...

What stuck out the most for me in the poem was capitalization of Beauty which normally is not. By capitalizing Beauty, I think that the author is putting two different meanings to the word. She first uses the word as its original meaning as most people understands, and secondly I think that she may be referring to herself. Throughout the poem, she claims that Euclid was the only person who had genuine understanding of beauty, which the second poem by David Kramer questions if she had read and seen other forms of art from different artists/writers. However, by referring to Beauty as a proper noun which also could mean herself, she is claiming that Euclid is the only artist who understood and believed in the definition of Beauty the same way that she does, not because she is ignorant of other forms of art. 

I think that it is very important to acknowledge non-European sources of mathematics since there are many benefits that can follow from studying mathematics from different cultures. By learning that there were different ways that the different civilizations used and proved same mathematical concepts, students can learn that there are several ways to approach a question. Often the creativity is ignored in math classes and students are asked to reiterate what they saw on the board, but by acknowledging different styles and approaches of different cultures, the students can naturally comprehend that mathematics is a creative process. Also, by studying mathematics from different cultures, students can be more appreciative of different cultures as they see that there were other cultures that were just as intellectually advanced as the western societies.   When I first learned that Pythagoras was not the first person to discover Pythagorean theorem, I was shocked and thought about th...