Heesung Yun EDCP442

 1. The subjects that were studied in the medieval universities were called liberal arts where liberal meant that they were for free men. As part of liberal "arts", it was surprising to see subjects such as grammar, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy which would be part of sciences to be considered to be arts.  2. The difference usages of the words logistic and logic: logistics meant practical and utilitarian usage of numbers and calculations and therefore were for children and slaves while logic meant liberal arts which corresponds to further study of numbers which were for the free men. 3. For Greeks, logistics was a study of dealing with sensible objects and doing computation, reckoning, the arithmetic of business while arithmetic was more advanced philosophical study of numbers that looked at the relations and nature of the numbers. This is quite contrasting to modern understanding of these words, as arithmetic often refers to brainless, repetitive calculations while logi...

 The film Dancing Euclidean Proofs  is a video that I would like to show to students in class in the future. I think that there is a common misconception that math is a rigid subject where there are very set tools, methods of solving and presenting understanding. I think that by showing this video to the students, they can learn that there are diverse ways to understand mathematical principles and there are no set ways that they have to show their understanding. Also as a person who majored in mathematics from the faculty of arts, I think that it would be a great opportunity for the students to see the artistic side of mathematics. However, I do not believe that the physically proofs activity would be very effective in the school settings because of several constraints that the students face. First, they have to understand the principles and theorems from reading the Euclid's Element which could be too difficult to them since they are not experienced with reading mathematical ...

 Most interesting fact that I observed from the presentations was frequency of appearances of familiar names in different presentations which shows the influence of these mathematicians across diverse fields of mathematics. For instance, ancient Greek mathematicians like Pythagoras, Archimedes and Euclid were mentioned multiple times in Dion, Yiru, Mike and Victor's presentations as well as my own. More over, modern mathematicians such as Descartes and Cardano were mentioned in Crystal, Ivan, and Dion's presentations. Another thing which I noticed is that most of the mathematicians were also vastly invested in philosophy. I knew that there were not much differentiating in mathematics and philosophy for the ancient Greeks as they viewed math as a way of epistemology, but I did not know that these commonalities continued until more modern times. During Emilie's presentation, she mentioned that Gauss wanted to be a philosopher until he was 19, and Descartes mentioned in Crysta...

 There were lots of cool facts that I learned from the presentations on Wednesday. One thing that I found most interesting is the fact that almost all mathematical discoveries were made across different regions at different times. Also it is very interesting to see that at times, mathematical knowledge that was lost in certain  regions were kept in different cultures which then gets reintroduced to the same region. In Yi Wei's presentation it was interesting to learn that Chinese first translated Euclid's work and had originally had the word rational numbers which was mistranslated to Japanese as reasonable numbers and came back to China as reasonable numbers instead of its original name. Besides the anecdotal things, I thought that the Indian mathematician in 1300 from Andrew's presentation being able to come up with a version of mean value theorem without any knowledge of Calculus was very impressive.