Albert Durer. Melancolia

Integrating History of Mathematics in the Classroom

Before reading the chapter, I had already thought about introducing history in Math class to give context to the concept that needs to be learned. I am a member of 3blue1brown.com, a website that illustrates math and shares snippets of history about essential math concepts and problems. I realized that knowing about the original question that motivated past generations to think, research and develop math concepts and notations, increased my curiosity about exploring the different approaches and perspectives of those concepts, and increased my patience to try to understand them.

            Here are the things that made me stop, highlight and think:

·        Learning about math history shows us that failing is part of the math learning process and helps us to understand why some abstract concepts took time to be discovered, and consequently, could be difficult for us and for our students to understand in the first place.

·        Math history is full of collaborative efforts and passion, which brings balance to the curriculum of practical knowledge, and introduces the explanation of the need for proof, rigour and evidence.

·        I was delighted when I found an example about the origins of the “quaternion concept” because I’ve been using this frequently in my career in visual effects for film and television. I used it to create organic rotations and procedural modelling with different computer graphics software, and I remember my need to revisit the concept explanation, looking for videos that helped me to understand such a beautiful tool, but I never looked for the origins of the concept.

Now I am more than convinced and motivated to integrate the math history as much as possible, regardless of the time it takes to achieve it.