2008-06-19 21:37:00
One of the few second year's courses that I got out of the way in my first year at college is History 2, ie Geschiedenis 2 - Vakgedeelte. I'd planned on leaving the didactical part of the course until the next year.
The workload for this course isn't that high and it mostly depends on the students reading a whole book on the history of mathematics. Starting at the arithmetic of the Egyptians and Babylonians we proceed through India, Arabia, the middle ages and the Renaissance to discover how maths evolved through the ages. Surprisingly most of the really interesting stuff starts around the seventeenth century. -Astoundingly-, over 90% of the maths we know was invented after 1900. o_O
As part of the preparations for our exam, each student was asked to write a two page biography of a famous mathematician. I was assigned Euclid (Euclides in dutch).
This document is available as a .PDF document and can be downloaded here.
This course relies on a syllabus made by the Hogeschool and the Math through the ages book by Berlinghoff and Gouvea (Amazon.com). Since the book's rather voluminous I reckoned I'd write a summary of the whole thing, with some stuff from the syllabus thrown in.
This document is available as a .PDF document and can be downloaded here.
One of the minor assignments we were given was to work out a few ancient, dutch math assignments. Well, ancient? Sixteenth, seventeenth century like-stuff. It was actually fun to try and decypher the instructions given in the original texts.
This document is available as a .PDF document and can be downloaded here.
kilala.nl tags: school, teaching, summary, maths,
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