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CIRCLE WITH A DOT

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mathematicalsynesthesia@hachyderm.io

@mathematicalsynesthesia@hachyderm.io
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  • Don't make me regret this ...
    M mathematicalsynesthesia@hachyderm.io

    @ColinTheMathmo @antoinechambertloir @e7_87 as somebody else mentioned here and elsewhere, Sophie Germain would be a perfect example for what you are trying to do if you connect her to Gauss, and bring up questions about why she pretends to be a man (even if you question whether or not Gauss would have listened to her had he known she was a woman).

    I also think there is value in doing cross generational discussions (as I mentioned Pingala made discoveries that were replicated 1400 and 1800 years later by Fibonacci and Pascal) why is there attribution to Fibonacci and Pascal, and like Antoine has pointed out there are sociological reasons for this.

    There are parallels between the lives of Hypatia, Maria Gaetana Agnesi and Ada Lovelace, but then there are also extreme dissimilarities between their lives.

    You can mention Queen Dido and her solution to the isoperimetroc problem in the foundation of the city of Carthage. This connects to Virgil’s Aeneid.

    You can also compare the lives of Sofya Kolavskeya and Maria Chudnovsky where there are parallels (born in Russia/Soviet Union, both left the country to pursue a higher degree, both made groundbreaking advances to a problem that had been open for many years) yet they were born a little over one hundred years and the conditions for the recognition of mathematic talent amongst women had changed (their lives have been completely different in many other aspects).

    Somebody mentioned Ada Lovelace, her story has many connections to the beginnings of computer science, she was the daughter of Lord Byron, who was instrumental in the stories surrounding the creations of horror icons such as Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster.

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  • Don't make me regret this ...
    M mathematicalsynesthesia@hachyderm.io

    @ColinTheMathmo Colin, I teach a course at my institution called “Hi(dden)story of Mathematics” and I would be happy to share the outline of my course (and even some notes) and you could adapt some of it for your purposes.

    The course is divided into units.

    Unit 1 relates to ways in which our ancestors counted. We discussed the Babylonian (base 60) enumeration system, the Roman numerals, the Maya numerals (base 20), the Inca quipu (knot counting) and yupana (Inca abacus/calculator) the enumeration system of the ancient people of India, how it was adapted by the Arabs and the abacus and the Chinese counting rods.

    Unit 2 relates to how ancient cultures develop ways to measure time (why does a circle have 360 degrees) along with storytelling exploring the significance/mysticism surrounding the numbers 7 and 12 (twelve tribes in Israel, twelve disciples of Jesus, twelve gods living in Olympus, twelve animals running the race for the jade emperor, twelve sons of Ishmael) why 13 is unlucky in Europe but not elsewhere, and how 13 is a sacred number instead for the Maya and the Egyptians for example. We also discuss the Maya calendar, the Jewish calendar and discuss how to convert between dates in those calendars and the Gregorian one.

    Unit 3 relates to the origins on combinatorics and we discuss Acharya Pingala’s rules for enumerating verse structures in Sanskrit and realize Pingala described the binary enumerating system, the binomial coefficients and the Fibonacci numbers all based on verse structure of poetry. We connect this discovery (which happened in 400 BCE) to Fibonacci’s liber abaci and Blaise Pascal’s triangle and have a discussion on why we call them today Pascal’s triangle and Fibonacci numbers instead of Pingala’s triangle and numbers. In the end we decide that we should call them the Fibonacci-Pingala numbers and the Pascal-Pingala triangle (this eventually gets further renamed to Khayam-Pascal-Pingala triangle)

    I will continue later…

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