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Poems about Euclid

 It has been a while since I sat down ad read a poem. I would probably go back as far as the English 12 provincial that they no longer do now to find my last poem reading. When I tried to look into information about Euclid's life, I was surprised at how little information is retained over the course of time. The same is not true when I look at Pythagoras or Archimedes. where great tales pass down to people that don't study much math. In fact, I saw an interesting argument about Euclid being a pen name, and a group of mathematicians instead published results under this name. While this is not commonly accepted, it shows the lack of information and how little we can know about Euclid's life. The poem makes many references to Beauty. Since it's capitalized, it might be personification (or not, forgive my literature analysis) of some idea. Now normally for poems like this, I would think Beauty refers to maybe beautiful objects, beautiful people, or beautiful scenes or natur...
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Crest of the Peacock: Reading response

Upon my initial reading of this book, I am surprised by the Eurocentric presentation provided in figure 1.1. The figure attributes development of mathematics solely to Greeks and Europe. I am simply surprised that this was the kind of “facts” put into textbooks in European countries. I myself attended school in Asia for the early years of my childhood, and it was definitely not presented that way. I am Chinese, and while there was not an emphasis on history of mathematics in China, I know that China has a long winding history and developed many mathematical ideas independently from the west as there was little communication. Things like arithmetic, number system, Chinese Remainder Theorem are all notable examples, and there are recovered books and documents showing many mathematical ideas such as taxes, percentage, division, even measurements of pi, volume, area…etc. So drawing from my own experiences, the Eurocentric presentation is a shock. The second interesting point for me is ...
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Should Pythagoras's theorem be renamed?

 As a preface to this topic I am Chinese myself and am aware (partially) of the history of mathematics in ancient China.  I think knowing that mathematics is not just one person's contribution but rather discovery of principles that could happen independently is important. Being aware that mathematics could be and had been discovered across different continents in ancient times could change the view that mathematics is just some hoax or textbook problems that one has to grind through. They might feel more personally connected if they discover that lots of places contribute to mathematics and not just Europe and might find it more entertaining knowing the backstory of how these theorems are discovered. Interestingly enough, it seems that in mathematics textbook written in Chinese, they actually refer to what we call Pythagoras's theorem as Gou-gu theorem like they mentioned in the paper. Perhaps we could put 2 people's name on it based on independent proofs found in historic...
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