History of Mathematics - Yubin

I remember that as a student I always thought about how different cultures other than European or North American are not mentioned in Canadian classrooms. It certainly felt foreign for me especially who was a English Language Learner student and a new immigrant to Canada. I even thought other cultural contexts were irrelevant. Hence, I believe acknowledging non-European methods in mathematics will have huge impacts on students. Having different cultural representation in a classroom will allow students from different backgrounds to feel included and engaged. Students can also learn how learning and education can have diverse perspectives which will encourage students to explore the global context of education. Also, just learning and knowing more about different cultures can help students to familiarize themselves with other cultures and appreciate them. This will allow students to be more open-minded instead of having Eurocentric views. Acknowledging non-European methods will have hug...

According to the Egyptian mythology, Horus and Set had a battle to claim the throne of Egypt. During the battle, Horus lost his eye and it was ripped into six pieces. However, the god Thoth collected and restored Horus's eye. Hence, the Eye of Horus symbolizes health and wholeness. The Egyptians ascribed six unit fractions, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, and 1/64, to each piece of the Eye of Horus. One of the most interesting facts was that the Egyptian only used the Eye of Horus's unit fractions to measure and divide grains. It makes me wonder what beliefs and values they ascribed to grains and foods. One of the examples of numbers having stories is that 4 was often symbolized as "death" in South Korea because Chinese character that means "death" sounds alike with 4 in Korean. Chinese and Korean languages are closely related, if you did not know. Hence, the buildings in South Korea, especially the old ones, often represent fourth floor as floor "F" or...

Our problem was about finding Pythagorean number triples. Initially, it felt very ambiguous to find the ancient solution for the problem. Even though it was clearly mentioned that there has been no information discovered about how or why Plimpton 322 was created, I was keep stressing about finding the perfect, complete ancient solution which probably was impractical to do in a time frame we were given for this assignment. Hence, it was hard to make progress through this project and I was not certain about how to approach the problem. After acknowledging and realizing that I won't be able to have the exact solution that the ancient Babylonians came up for Pythagorean triples, I began to ask myself some questions, such as what contents are included and not included in Plimpton 322, what is the context behind it, are there similar ideas from different nations or time period, are there information about other concepts, like square roots and trigonometry, related to Pythagorean triples,...