Ian EDCP 442 2020

 Reading source: https://www.recoveredscience.com/const102horuseye.htm   What was interesting in my research was the strong between Egyptian Mythology and the idea of fractions. It seems that symbols were taken apart from the complete Eye of the Horus and each one of them was given the meaning by dividing by 2. The intriguing part is that the fractions add up to 1-1/64, which suggests that the symbols do not add up to 1, which suggests that it might not be complete when you put it back altogether. There are likely some reason in Egyptian Mythology that might give a explanation about that. It is clear that they likely obtained these fractions by continued division of 2, which yields the interesting question: why did they stop at 1/64 and not continue? Did they realize that they wouldn't get the sum 1 unless it is an infinite series? Coming off the top of my mind, I think Chinese has some interesting meanings for numbers as well. For example, the number 4 sounds like the word de...

 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...

 Suppose you are very keen on getting those mooncakes for autumn. You see a promotion where if you buy any amount of mooncake, an additional sixth of that will be given out as gifts. You decide that you need 21 mooncakes to satisfy the cravings of yours. How many do you need to buy? Solution: To be announced on Wednesday? As a remark it's interesting to see that the method of false position works out perfectly when the variables on one side works out to be a formally linear function: f(0) = 0, f(2x) = 2f(x) for every x. That is likely something they have thought about and taken advantage of when encountering these problems.

 Perhaps none of us escaped from doing good old word problems in mathematics and in many other areas. Surprisingly, we can trace its roots all the way to more than 5000 years ago, which would counter the argument that word problems are made by the modern education system for whatever goals it intends to serve. The idea of pure vs applied mathematics seems to stem mostly from academic areas, where scholars jokingly say that math is at the top with applied math below it, with other sciences coming in the order of physics, chemistry, biology and so on. I feel that this is analogous to asking whether the egg came first or the hen came first. Some areas of mathematics, namely number theory, primes and divisors, seem to be more of a matter of taste, as some of us couldn't care less if there are Mersenne primes or sum of divisors being equal to itself. Recent technological breakthrough in computing requires more secure encryption, and surprisingly, there is quite a bit of number theory dr...

 

  While the use of algebra, or the use of single letters to represent unknown quantity, makes problem solving easier to present and understand, I think it is not strictly necessary to do so in order to state anything mathematically precise. For instance, I can state Pythagorean’s theorem as the sum of the square of the two shorter side lengths in a right-angled triangle is equal to the square of the longest side length of the same triangle. This would be more compactly represented using a diagram and labelling the sides with letters like a,b,c as commonly done. Using words specific in language to represent math might bring trouble when communicating with others outside of your region, but perhaps that wasn’t a problem when people were mostly confined to their local region without effective transportation.   As for whether math is all about abstractions and generalization, I would say that abstraction is a tool that allows people to work on problems presented to them withou...

1 45 2 22,30 3 15 4 11,15 5 9 6 7,30 10 4,30