I retired from the US Navy after 20 years of service in 2012
and moved back to West Michigan with my Italian wife, she’s from Milan, and my
sons Arnold (12 and a Michigander), Lance (10 and a Californian), and JJ (8 and
Neapolitan). Since then I have received my certification as a school counselor
and just finish up the Graduate Teacher Certification (GTC) for a secondary
certification in math, computer science, and psychology and this class and
Calculus III will give me a bachelor’s of arts in secondary education with a
math major and computer science minor.
Syllabus ?: Reading and blogging count. Can we choose some
math to work on either for review or to solve a personal question and use that
as daily work as well?
I am going to start with the book, The Calculus Gallery, and
then use, Math Doesn’t Suck, as my second book.
What is math? – To me, math is more than just numbers and
logic. It is an adventure full of puzzles to solve. Along the way, we collect
tools like numbers and logic, that help us solve those problems and describe
the world around us.
Biggest moments/discoveries in history of math - Okay, I
have really become fascinated with realization that many of the discoveries in
math come from a mathematician asking the question, “What if?” Such as, what if
I were working with a number system that only includes the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4,
5, 6, 7, 8, 9, & 10? What implications would that have for the operations
of addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication? What patterns would I
see and what would it reveal?
As such, the idea that at some point in human history we did
not have the number zero and did not realize the importance of the number,
amazes me.
Another one is Calculus. As I am preparing to take Calculus
III after this course, it has been on my mind and so I have been looking into how
it came to be and this led me to Sir Isaac Newton. I found the book Isaac
Newton Written by: James Gleick on Audible and it was amazing. To think
that we can, at least in part, credit the existence of Calculus to the Plague,
is crazy.
Euclid – I understand that Euclid’s use of axioms and the
systematic use of axioms as a way to prove mathematical principles and then use
those to prove others, was a big step in moving math from the mathematics used
by Egyptians, as in math that was tied directly to the physical world, to the
world of mathematical proofs where what was being proven may or may not have a
connection to the physical world.
Looking forward to this class and learning more about math
and math history!
Jerry
What if is a great question to focus on. It gave us all the cool numbers - fractions, irrationals, transcendentals, complex - and so many neat areas of mathematics since.
ReplyDeleteI agree, it has been the driving force in many of the things I have done in my life. What if? Well, there's really only one way to find out!
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