Don't make me regret this ...
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@ColinTheMathmo
Keep your eyes peeled for a paper about a project I did on this with a research partner just over a year ago. Currently in peer-review.I was/am similarly resistant to the "make it relevant" stuff, largely because it often feels contrived or bolted-on, precisely because we (as maths teachers) are told to do these things with little-to-no training or resources to enable us to do it properly.
Exhortations to "make it {fun, interesting, relevant}" strongly imply that these things are not intrinsic, and _that_ is where we lose people with contrived relevance and context.
@ColinTheMathmo
This is partly why we decided to set up a network rather than producing a collection of resources; connecting people (including but not limited to teachers of mathematics and history) who are already interested and want to explore further to develop *themselves*, rather than firing some PowerPoint slides into the ether and saying 'break your lesson-flow and slot this script in'. -
@TeaKayB Part of the problem is that people making these exhortations were themselves badly served by the educational experience they suffered through.
It's complex, and I suspect we are in (near) complete agreement.
@ColinTheMathmo
Absolutely. I find with many 'arguments' about maths education, both sides are arguing the same point, but from slightly different angles and with differing understandings of seemingly common vocabulary. -
To some extent, I'd like people in general, children in particular, to hear of someone, then be able to put them into context.
I think this is an impossible task, so in some senses I'm looking to see why and how it's impossible, perhaps then to decrease the scope and ambition, possibly to make something useful.
Eventually.
4/n, n=4
@ColinTheMathmo
Beatrice Shilling (aeronautics)
Janet Taylor (astronomy, navigation)
Rosalind_Franklin
Valentina Tereshkova
Dorothy Hodgkin
Tu Youyou (pharmaceutical chemist)
Baroness Ingrid Daubechies (JPEG)
Grace Hopper
Gladys Mae West (GPS)
Emmy Noether (symmetry)
Mary Cartwright (chaos theory)
Annie Scott Dill Maunder
Caroline Herschel
Gerty Theresa Cori (glycogen)
Williamina Fleming (astronomy)
Alice Augusta Ball (chemistry)
Katherine Johnson (orbital mechanics) -
@ColinTheMathmo
Beatrice Shilling (aeronautics)
Janet Taylor (astronomy, navigation)
Rosalind_Franklin
Valentina Tereshkova
Dorothy Hodgkin
Tu Youyou (pharmaceutical chemist)
Baroness Ingrid Daubechies (JPEG)
Grace Hopper
Gladys Mae West (GPS)
Emmy Noether (symmetry)
Mary Cartwright (chaos theory)
Annie Scott Dill Maunder
Caroline Herschel
Gerty Theresa Cori (glycogen)
Williamina Fleming (astronomy)
Alice Augusta Ball (chemistry)
Katherine Johnson (orbital mechanics)@spacemagick Out of interest, how many of these people (who should be better known, and who I will definitely include (mostly)) do you think kids ... or adults ... will have heard of?
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Don't make me regret this ...
I'm thinking of making a timeline of characters and events from history that school children might know of and be interested in. Most timelines you find are overly complex, or overly simplistic.
Who and what would you include?
I'm interested in connecting science people with historical context, and pulling in non-(old dead white dude)s.
1/n
@ColinTheMathmo for events rather than people: the reign of terror. Which explains why several famous French mathematicians and scientists died in 1794.
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@e7_87 @ColinTheMathmo for Hilbert's 10th problem, the rôle of Julia Robinson is largely underestimated.
@e7_87 @ColinTheMathmo just lazily browsing Wikipedia's list of women in mathematics, I would suggest to look at the work of Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat, Nicole El Karoui, Shafi Goldwasser, Krystina Kuperberg, Olga Ladyzhenskaia, Dusa McDuff, Maryam Mirzakhani, Cathleen Morawetz, Ruth Moufang, Marina Ratner, Diana Shelstad, Vera Sós, Irene Stegun, Olga Taussky-Todd, Ulrike Tilman, Karen Uhlenbeck, Marie-France Vignéras, etc. For many of them, a Fields medal or a similar award would not have been inappropriate.
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@ColinTheMathmo
Sir Christopher Wren is another well-known historical figure whose mathematical connections are almost unheard of amongst the population at large.A certain someone will give me another funny look if I don't mention Mary Somerville.
On that note, I created some resources for @mathsweek.scot that aim to help people explore some Scottish mathematical figures: https://mathsweek.scot/schools/learning-resources/finn-finity-meets
I don't think I've seen anyone else mention him, but in terms of situating developments in maths alongside more well-known historical events, then... Shakespeare. Born in between publication of Robert Recorde's two important books that helped to embed an entirely new number system into British life, industry, and commerce. He and his own father would have learnt not just different algorithms for calculating in their respective school careers, but entirely different number _systems_, and there's evidence of Bill playing with this new-fangled system throughout his famous works.
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@e7_87 @ColinTheMathmo just lazily browsing Wikipedia's list of women in mathematics, I would suggest to look at the work of Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat, Nicole El Karoui, Shafi Goldwasser, Krystina Kuperberg, Olga Ladyzhenskaia, Dusa McDuff, Maryam Mirzakhani, Cathleen Morawetz, Ruth Moufang, Marina Ratner, Diana Shelstad, Vera Sós, Irene Stegun, Olga Taussky-Todd, Ulrike Tilman, Karen Uhlenbeck, Marie-France Vignéras, etc. For many of them, a Fields medal or a similar award would not have been inappropriate.
@e7_87 @ColinTheMathmo ... And if I were like to understand why many of those names belong to applied mathematics, then I would study the concept of gatekeeping.
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@ColinTheMathmo
Beatrice Shilling (aeronautics)
Janet Taylor (astronomy, navigation)
Rosalind_Franklin
Valentina Tereshkova
Dorothy Hodgkin
Tu Youyou (pharmaceutical chemist)
Baroness Ingrid Daubechies (JPEG)
Grace Hopper
Gladys Mae West (GPS)
Emmy Noether (symmetry)
Mary Cartwright (chaos theory)
Annie Scott Dill Maunder
Caroline Herschel
Gerty Theresa Cori (glycogen)
Williamina Fleming (astronomy)
Alice Augusta Ball (chemistry)
Katherine Johnson (orbital mechanics)@ColinTheMathmo
And some less sciencey ones:
Hilda Matheson (BBC, 'Director of Talks')
Delia Derbyshire (BBC, electronic music)
Daphne Oram (BBC, electronic music)
Maddalena Fagandini (BBC, electronic music) -
@spacemagick Out of interest, how many of these people (who should be better known, and who I will definitely include (mostly)) do you think kids ... or adults ... will have heard of?
@ColinTheMathmo
Oh, maybe about half of them, if we're lucky.
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@e7_87 @ColinTheMathmo just lazily browsing Wikipedia's list of women in mathematics, I would suggest to look at the work of Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat, Nicole El Karoui, Shafi Goldwasser, Krystina Kuperberg, Olga Ladyzhenskaia, Dusa McDuff, Maryam Mirzakhani, Cathleen Morawetz, Ruth Moufang, Marina Ratner, Diana Shelstad, Vera Sós, Irene Stegun, Olga Taussky-Todd, Ulrike Tilman, Karen Uhlenbeck, Marie-France Vignéras, etc. For many of them, a Fields medal or a similar award would not have been inappropriate.
@antoinechambertloir For the purposes of engaging younger students, a list of random people of whom they've never heard is possibly not the best thing to do. Yes, these are (potentially) important people to be remembered, but creating engagement in students is perhaps not going to be helped by such a list.
This is hard. This is very hard, bordering on impossible. But I'm trying to connect things students have heard of with each other, and with new things they can learn about.
Newton, the Great Plague, and the Great Fire of London is a well-known and well-established connection.
Question: What was happening in Europe when Gauss was around? What music? What politicians? Who might he have met?
For example, Gauss and Beethoven were contemporaries.
That sort of thing.
CC: @e7_87
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@ColinTheMathmo Noether?
@psu_13 @ColinTheMathmo
Definitely. She who pointed out the connection between symmetry and conservation laws.
#maths #physics -
@ColinTheMathmo
Oh, maybe about half of them, if we're lucky.@spacemagick I think you'd find that if you polled secondary school students in the UK, the average of the number of these they have heard of would hover around 0.1.
I suspect most students will have heard of none of them.
Some will know of Katherine Johnson because of the film, and for those who do computing, a small proportion would know of Hopper.
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@spacemagick I think you'd find that if you polled secondary school students in the UK, the average of the number of these they have heard of would hover around 0.1.
I suspect most students will have heard of none of them.
Some will know of Katherine Johnson because of the film, and for those who do computing, a small proportion would know of Hopper.
@ColinTheMathmo
There's a film? Didn't know that.
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@ColinTheMathmo
There's a film? Didn't know that.@spacemagick I suspect from the smiley that you do know about the film "Hidden Figures"
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@antoinechambertloir For the purposes of engaging younger students, a list of random people of whom they've never heard is possibly not the best thing to do. Yes, these are (potentially) important people to be remembered, but creating engagement in students is perhaps not going to be helped by such a list.
This is hard. This is very hard, bordering on impossible. But I'm trying to connect things students have heard of with each other, and with new things they can learn about.
Newton, the Great Plague, and the Great Fire of London is a well-known and well-established connection.
Question: What was happening in Europe when Gauss was around? What music? What politicians? Who might he have met?
For example, Gauss and Beethoven were contemporaries.
That sort of thing.
CC: @e7_87
@ColinTheMathmo @antoinechambertloir
Feel bad; as a female math enthusiasts on the above list I only knew Dusa McDuff, Maryam Mirzakhani, Olga Taussky-Todd... And I believe I did read Vera Sós's wiki-bio... -
@antoinechambertloir For the purposes of engaging younger students, a list of random people of whom they've never heard is possibly not the best thing to do. Yes, these are (potentially) important people to be remembered, but creating engagement in students is perhaps not going to be helped by such a list.
This is hard. This is very hard, bordering on impossible. But I'm trying to connect things students have heard of with each other, and with new things they can learn about.
Newton, the Great Plague, and the Great Fire of London is a well-known and well-established connection.
Question: What was happening in Europe when Gauss was around? What music? What politicians? Who might he have met?
For example, Gauss and Beethoven were contemporaries.
That sort of thing.
CC: @e7_87
@ColinTheMathmo I was reacting to some sentence, earlier in the thread, by somebody else, that I read as “no woman has done notable things” and my — angry — answer was, “maybe learn what these women have done before saying such a thing.”
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@ColinTheMathmo
Beatrice Shilling (aeronautics)
Janet Taylor (astronomy, navigation)
Rosalind_Franklin
Valentina Tereshkova
Dorothy Hodgkin
Tu Youyou (pharmaceutical chemist)
Baroness Ingrid Daubechies (JPEG)
Grace Hopper
Gladys Mae West (GPS)
Emmy Noether (symmetry)
Mary Cartwright (chaos theory)
Annie Scott Dill Maunder
Caroline Herschel
Gerty Theresa Cori (glycogen)
Williamina Fleming (astronomy)
Alice Augusta Ball (chemistry)
Katherine Johnson (orbital mechanics)@ColinTheMathmo
Historically important though Valentina Tereshkova is, it's also worth noting that she was very much a political pawn in the space-race. The Soviets (like ALL politicians) generally only did morally good things in order to draw attention to themselves or away from their imagined enemies. -
@ColinTheMathmo @antoinechambertloir
Feel bad; as a female math enthusiasts on the above list I only knew Dusa McDuff, Maryam Mirzakhani, Olga Taussky-Todd... And I believe I did read Vera Sós's wiki-bio...@e7_87 @ColinTheMathmo there's no need to feel bad. There must be sociological reasons why women are not remembered. For example we value the final steps more than the elaboration of an invisible theory. Maybe that's why some brilliant women preferred doing that kind of things than exposing themselves. Have a look at Stegun's work. Spending a whole professional life maintaining tables of special functions which were used in all of applied math and engineering, before computer programs could make the job for everybody.
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@ColinTheMathmo for events rather than people: the reign of terror. Which explains why several famous French mathematicians and scientists died in 1794.
@ColinTheMathmo
Gutenberg and his moveable type press (not the first, but extremely important an event nevertheless).
Luther and the 95 theses.
Columbus' voyages to the new world.
Arthur Conan Doyle.
Robert Louis Stevenson.
Charles Dickens.
Emily Bronte.
Jane Austen.
Mary Wallstonecraft.
Mary Shelley.You could have indicators for longer eras. So for example, the height of the Aztec empire, various other civilisations in the Americas. Or for various influential dynasties in China.
