Blog Post #1 – Integrating History of Mathematics

Throughout my childhood, I was fascinated with numbers. My grandmother was instrumental to helping me develop a passion for mathematics. She was a teacher and principal in India for over 40 years, and she too had a love for math. Instead of sending me to pre-school, my grandmother offered to care for me while my parents went to work. I still remember the math problems she used to draw up for me, and that she taught me multiplication tables up till 12 by the time I reached kindergarten. As I progressed through school and learned higher levels of math, it inevitably got more complicated. I began to question why, and how math works. Conceptually, I struggled to understand how concepts like pi and Pythagorean theorem were created thousands of years ago.

I think it is important for students to learn about the history of math so that there is context provided for what we are learning. Far too often I remember being frustrated with not knowing why we were learning math, and what the context and history behind it was. Something that stood out to me in the article was reading about the famous unsolved problems - it still boggles my mind that there are math equations that have not yet been solved. I also enjoyed reading about the examples for implementation of math history in the classroom. Showing students films about math would be a simple way to engage them. While not exactly about math, A Beautiful Mind and Imitation Game are both great films related to Economics and Code-breaking!