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...

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...