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Course Reflection

 Its December already! Time flies, and another term has past. For a lot of people, including me, this course began as just another course to take in the program. Granted, it was related to math so I thought it would be less boring. As we met weekly and discussed various interesting methods and stories about mathematics in the past, this class quickly became the most interesting class of the semester. I love how we explored so many different ideas from the past that have been buried under the Eurocentric view of the world. It is easy to believe that just about anything is created somewhere in North American or Europe. Big names like Edison, Newton, Gauss, and they are all very white. It is not a surprise that the richest countries in the world at various times were also the centre of research, discovery, and innovations. The presentations, readings, and reflections that the class has asked me to do prompted me to think about how math fits in our society. The presentations and storie...
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Assignment 3: Personal Reflection

 After my presentation, it made me think more about the history of scientific innovations and discoveries and whether or not it is biased. My presentation revolved around Alan Turing and his life, and unfortunately Alan did not live a rich and long life. Computer industries are in the trillions and it has revolutionized every aspect of how we live. The problem is that the richest companies or individuals are often not the ones who have created all the theories and technology required for the boom. I think this extends equally well in other fields: fundamental research is often funded by government and not much financial gain comes out of it. Practical, profitable adaptations come in later on top of the hard work built previously and become the winners. Like one of the course readings, the ancient Greeks treated theory and thinking highly, and practical careers were considered low-class. Today seems to be the opposite: we reward those that commercialize products and services, and ou...
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Assignment 3: Artwork on Math History

 As a group (Ian, Ealin, Mariana) we have chosen tow write a short story on the life of Alan Turing and his contribution to the modern world. Our short story (A clickable link). https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jfDYDyK-tOTb9baDtN9_-PbIMbMVTYFB3ef2qSi48s0/edit?usp=sharing (if you cannot click the link, you can copy this and paste into the browser of your choice) Our presentation (A clickable link) https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1TE2YRjlo5P95dFc6Xq-zM49bjyhZwmytjG_eXiVRstU/edit?usp=sharing (if you cannot click the link, you can copy this and paste into the browser of your choice)   Group Explication of Research     As a group, we chose to write a story about Alan Turing, an aspiring mathematician who contributed an enormous amount during the WWII period, but died as a criminal. Through our research of Alan Turing using the references below, we thought his life story and mathematical contributions would best be told in the artistic format of a short sto...
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An introduction to the mathematics of the Golden Age of medieval Islam

 The first thing that surprises me is how early people have started wondering about the shape of earth and the circumference. An extraordinary force of curiosity must have been present for people to go and tackle these problems that most of us today would not bother. Maybe physics major would design their experiment on measuring such a thing, but most of us is content with our ground being flat because that's what it appears to us. Another surprising thing is the Islam's desire to learn from other culture. It was mentioned that they sent out people to gather and translate copies of works that are important to the Greeks, and that doesn't seem to immediately benefit them in some way. Again, it seems to be some intellectual thoughts that drive them to do so. Even today, when translating might not be as tedious or difficult, quite a lot of work remains in their own language because we don't actively seek to translate everything (though I'm sure small groups of people a...
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Assignment 3 Draft Proposal

Group: Ealin, Mariana, Ian Topic: The History/Contributions of Alan Turing  Artistic Format : Short Story Draft References (at least 2 articles, books, or book chapters & 3 other sources)  Cooper, S. B., & Leeuwen, J. van. (2013). Alan Turing: His Work and Impact. Elsevier Science. https://doi.org/10.1016/C2010-0-66380-2   Cowell, A. (2019, June 5). Overlooked No More: Alan Turing, Condemned Code Breaker and Computer Visionary . The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/obituaries/alan-turing-overlooked.html   Hodges, A. (2013). Alan Turing . Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing/    O’Connor, J. J., & Robertson, E.F., Alan Mathison Turing. Maths History St. Andrews MacTutor. https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Turing/   Teuscher, C. (2004). Alan Turing: Life and Legacy . Springer Berlin Heidelberg. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/10.1007/978-3-662-05642-4
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Trivium & Quadrivium reading

 The first quote I came across is "Aristotle advanced a similar plan in which the elementary training consisted of reading, writing, gymnastics, and music; and the advanced studies included arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, with the emphasis on the natural sciences." It was interesting to me since they consider gymnastics and music before arithmetic and natural sciences as elementary. I am not sure whether that necessarily indicate that those are easier topics to study, but basic arithmetic at least to me is quite a lot easier than music which has lots of structure along with hand-eye coordination.  Another interesting note was "[Martianus Capella] rejected medicine and architecture as purely technical subjects, pursued only for practical and not speculative ends and so unworthy of free men". I think this is quite the opposite of what we have today, where medicine is considered one of the most impactful jobs one can take and every year lots and lots of undergradu...
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Alice Major on Mayan and other numbers

 I think the quote "each of the positive integers was one of [Ramanujan's] personal friends" aligns very well with the results of Alice Major's paper: people tend to associate numbers with properties, an those association tend to be cultural based and not random. It's quite interesting that such a simple association in people that might come off as natural can be so involved in terms of brain structure and how we process and react to information. Neuroscience must be an interesting yet difficult field of study as we try to unfold the mystery of the brain. (Although I have presented already, I just wanted to say that John von Neumann's proposed self-replication machine predicts certain properties needed for it to happen: we need to have blueprints to replicate, the complexity required to self-replicate and self-repair. Even today, we cannot build a robot that fixes itself, but humans have been replicating (though not by oneself) and can self-repair to some degr...
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