Do you know a young person?

[colinthemathmo@mathstodon.xyz]

@Scmbradley Has your six-year-old heard of *any* "old famous" people?

[truenorthspice@mastodon.world]

@ColinTheMathmo
yeah, I felt the same.

(sorry, the 'weary' emoji threw me 'off'...I misunderstood your reaction. Thanks for clarifying)

[colinthemathmo@mathstodon.xyz]

Michelangelo?
Rodin?
Turner?
Ramanujan?

[dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz]

@ColinTheMathmo
Hey, the rest of us without kid contact could speculate a lot, too, but you told us not to.

[colinthemathmo@mathstodon.xyz]

@TrueNorthSpice That's not intended to be a "Weary" emoji ... it's a "Shocked Kitty"

[colinthemathmo@mathstodon.xyz]

@dougmerritt Feel free to speculate about what kids might know. Just mark it as such.

[wynke@mendeddrum.org]

@ColinTheMathmo I'll see if I can get a few names out of my teen tomorrow. (There are a few I know she knows though. At least two Dutch painters - Rembrandt and van Gogh.)

[scmbradley@mathstodon.xyz]

@ColinTheMathmo he knows about queen Victoria. He might have heard of Darwin? I'll ask him tomorrow who he knows about from olden times.

[truenorthspice@mastodon.world]

@ColinTheMathmo

At first I thought it was a shocked cat- looking at it, that makes sense, right?!
But my cursor happened to touch it and "weary cat" popped up---the same just now occurred when I went back and tried again.
Something is "off kilter" in Fediverse...or my computer.....

[colinthemathmo@mathstodon.xyz]

Margot Fonteyn?
Rudolf Nureyev?
Mikhail Baryshnikov?
Charlie Chaplin?
Fred Astaire?
Ginger Rogers?
Cary Grant?
Marilyn Monroe?

Who have kids heard of?

[dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz]

@ColinTheMathmo
*I* don't know who Margot Fonteyn is. (the others are as familiar as expected).

[pigworker@types.pl]

@ColinTheMathmo I used to set an exercise to sort a variety of events into chronological order. They would mostly be events in the history of computing, but with a few other bits and pieces, to keep people grounded. The latter tended to be a mixture of incidents of social progress and incidents of appalling and unaccounted-for evil.

[colinthemathmo@mathstodon.xyz]

@pigworker I'd be interested to see your list(s).

[sortius@beige.party]

@ColinTheMathmo I spend a lot of time talking to my kids about people from before 1950, so I think they're ok.

My son is doing a biography report on Sir Nigel Gressley, the designer of the Flying Scotsman, at school (year 3) so it naturally led on to Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Between school and home, I reckon they're across it

[eleanorrees@mas.to]

@ColinTheMathmo Anyone depicted in Horrible Histories. Especially if they've got a song and dance number.

[colinthemathmo@mathstodon.xyz]

@dougmerritt Interesting ... Are you one of today's 10 thousand?

I have another question that is easy to grasp once you get the idea, but I've found no easy way to describe it.

I might start another thread. It's about questions where the number of people who know the answer is mid range, but the reactions of everyone is astonishment that anyone else would or would not know the answer.

[colinthemathmo@mathstodon.xyz]

@dougmerritt But it's late here and I have an early start tomorrow. I might leave it for now.

[mpark@mathstodon.xyz]

@ColinTheMathmo (polling a 4th and a 6th grader) Dr. Seuss (Theodore something) . Milton Hershey. Galileo. Frida Kahlo. Plato. Socrates. Aristotle. Homer. Julius Ceasar. Nero. Commodus. Caligula. Augustus Caesar. Napolean. Blackbeard. Neil Armstrong. Shakespeare. Alexander Hamilton. Queen Elizabeth the 1st. Queen Elizabeth the 2nd. Adolf Hitler. George Washington. Abraham Lincoln. Theodore Roosevelt. Thomas Jefferson. Eliza Hamilton. Aaron Burr. Leonardo DaVinci. Lafayette. Lucille Ball. The Wright Brothers. Walt Disney. Nicola Tesla. Thomas Edison. Vincent Van Gogh. And they're bored now.

[bit101@mstdn.social]

@ColinTheMathmo From my daughter, who is 23. Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, C. Columbus, Henry VIII, Ada Lovelace, Hitler, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Jesus, Buddha, Ghengis Khan.

[colinthemathmo@mathstodon.xyz]

@mpark That's a fabulous list ... Thank you so much!!

And thank them so much!!