Assignment 1 Reflection

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, and etc. Asking these questions suggested me many different ways to approach the problem and helped me to view this problem from different perspectives.

This assignment reminded me again of complexity of mathematical ideas and how mathematics can be related to various topics. I think learning the history of mathematics will help students to learn that mathematics contains more than just numbers and formulas and how different contexts of the world can be translated into mathematics.

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