Reflection on Assignment 1
My biggest takeaway from last week’s presentations was the potential value of using historically-inspired geometry problems in a contemporary mathematics classroom. I want to start out this blog post with a quote by the Fields Medal-winning British-Lebanese mathematician Michael Atiyah. Speaking on the topic of contemporary algebra, he claimed that “ Algebra is the offer made by the devil to the mathematician. The devils says ‘I will give you this powerful machine, it will answer any question you like. All you need to do is give me your soul: give up geometry and you will have this marvellous machine.’” While intentionally provocative, I think that Atiyah’s observation contains an important nugget of wisdom: modern algebra, while extremely powerful, is also very abstract and formulaic. I, for example, remember having to memorize the volumes of a number of 3-dimensional shapes, and besides rectangular prisms, these formulas often remained unmotivated and unexplained. Looking specif...
Excellent!
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