Thoughts for week 2 - 530

When I taught Geometry a few years back, I used to spend a couple days on something I called "Story time". During "Story time" I read some of the stories that were printed in my college textbooks. One of the stories told of the evolution of human beings' understanding of the irrational number, Pi. The story describes how originally people thought the ratio of a circles circumference to its diameter (what Pi happens to be) was three. As more people made more measurements through history and knowledge grew, the approximation steadily got better.

Another story I would share was the tragic tale of French mathematician, Evariste Galois. The quadratic formula had been solved for centuries. The cubic and quartic were solved somewhere in the 1500's. In the advent of these solutions being determined, mathematicians looked for the solution to the quintic. For over 250 years, mathematicians tried. According to the story I read to my students, it occurred to Galois that perhaps there was no solution. He developed his theory, proved it, wrote his paper and submitted it for review. The reviewer lost it. Galois wrote another paper and submitted it. The reviewer died before reading it. He again submitted it. This time the reviewer did not possess the intellect to understand it. At the age of 20 before getting the acknowledgement for his crowning achievement, he was forced into a duel (the circumstances remain unclear). Knowing he had little chance of surviving, he wrote his thoughts and ideas feverishly the night before his demise.

The moral of these stories is the proof of us standing on the shoulders of giants. We need to further their legacies and honor their work instead of taking it for granted.

Finding some biographical histories for some of these giants could give another reason for students to study mathematics. Perhaps these biographies could be put into voicethread by students as a way to get "cross-curricular" and create some digital stories.