Mathematics : The Joy Of Mathematics In The World

Since Elementary school, I’ve been in love with math and all that it offers. I get excited with the numbers, the letters, and the equations. It fascinates me how there’s so much depth and that there is always something new with math. Not until I reached high school did I realize that the reason I loved math so much was because it was Algebra. My sophomore year I discovered Geometry, and that is when the loathing began.

In this paper, I will be writing about the math curriculum, including geometry, taught in schools across America in grades first through twelfth. In addition, I will also discuss what students in other countries are taught in the areas of mathematics. Then, we will look at the level of mathematical knowledge of students in the United States compares to those other countries. Finally, we will find out if there is a way we can improve our educational system to better our future generations understand of mathematics.

According to Greek historians, their mathematical pursuits began somewhere around 600 B.C.E. Our earliest record of Greek mathematics, however, is from 300 B.C.E. Unfortunately, most of what we know about the Greek mathematical tradition comes from the 3rd and 4th century. These works seem to do a decent job at preserving the past, but how well they preserve the works scholars cannot know (Berlinghoff & Gouvea, 2004, p. 14).

I experienced by middle and high school math classes not truly recognizing the intrinsic value of them and arrived at AP Calculus AB my junior year of high school holding the same apathy for them. The popular culture and ideology regarding mathematics is that unless a student is going to study engineering, s/he will never use trigonometry, algebra, or geometry. The actual subject matter didn’t matter, only the numerical stamp of progress and success did. I let myself get caught in that train of thinking, and quickly considered mathematics another obstacle I had to grudgingly hurdle to continue my studies.

 The math is something that people usually hate on school. But i don't. I always had facility with calculations. And my love for numbers increased when I firts won a certificat of merit on OBMEP (Brazilian Olympiad of Public School Mathematics).

Geometry and Algebra are so crucial to the development of the world it is taught to every public high school in the United States, around 14.8 million teenagers each year (National Center for Education Statistics). Mathematics is the engine powering our world; our stocks, economy, technology, and science are all based off from math. Math is our universal and definite language “I was especially delighted with the mathematics, on account of the certitude and evidence of their reasonings.” (Rene Descartes, 1637).

The author of Journey through Genius, William Dunham, begins this chapter by depicting how mathematics was spurred and developed in early civilizations. Dunham focuses primarily on the works’ and achievements’ of early Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece in this section. These ancient societies, as they developed, produced mathematicians such as; Thales, Pythagoras, and Hippocrates, who turned a basic human intuition for space and quantity into applicable everyday mathematics. The primary influences driving the development of early mathematics were the issues of growing civilizations, most notably counting commodities, taxation, and the division of land equally, rather than a pure desire for understanding that is seen in mathematics today. These influences culminated in the development of early arithmetic and geometry.

Ancient egyptians made some of the earliest forms of technology, mathematics was one of the most important form of technology as it

Math is all around us. Everywhere you go there is some sort of math involved consciously or subconsciously. Even though math is all around us, and everything we do involves math, I myself must say I dislike math. Research has shown there are many more people that dislike math compared to those who do like it. A survey done by a nonprofit organization named Change the Equation asked 1,000 middle school kids in 2010 whether they would prefer to eat broccoli or do one math problem, surprisingly more than half answered they would eat broccoli. Throughout the years, there have been many different strategies created on how to introduce and/or teach math to children.

“The Rhind Papyrus, dating from around 1650 BCE, is a kind of instruction manual ... and it gives us explicit demonstrations of how multiplication and division was carried out at that time.” (Mastin 1). It also contains evidence of other mathematical and physics- type information. This includes “unit fractions, composite and prime numbers, arithmetic, geometric and harmonic means, and how to solve first order linear equations as well as arithmetic and geometric series. The Rhind Papyrus, which dates from around 1300 BCE, shows that ancient Egyptians could solve second-order algebraic (quadratic) equations” (Mastin 1).

Mathematics is all around us, it is in our electronics, architecture, economics, many more, and of course in school. Everyone has to take some kind of mathematics class no matter where they went to school, regardless of their feelings toward mathematics. A great amount of students feel as if mathematics, especially advanced mathematics, is not useful for everyday life. Others feel the multiple step process to solve many mathematics questions is too difficult and time consuming. The amount of unknown words that are not used in everyday may be confusing to the students. All of this contributing to the growing negatively against mathematics. Negative feelings toward mathematics need to be changed to create more positive feelings associated with

Mathematics is one of the most certain areas of knowledge, because it connects to the real world better than the others. It is the one area of knowledge that most people believe in and studies

Mathematics, study of relationships among quantities, magnitudes, and properties and of logical operations by which unknown quantities, magnitudes, and properties may be deduced. In the past, mathematics was regarded as the science of quantity, whether of magnitudes, as in geometry, or of numbers, as in arithmetic, or of the generalization of these two fields, as in algebra. Toward the middle of the 19th century, however, mathematics came to be regarded increasingly as the science of relations, or as the science that draws necessary conclusions. This latter view encompasses mathematical or symbolic logic, the science of using symbols to provide an exact theory of logical deduction and inference based on

Mathematics, like every creation of man, have evolved without really knowing how far you can get with them: the scope of the computer, physics, chemistry, algebra, all are evidence of this. Every aspect of our culture is based in some way or another in Mathematics: language, music, dance, art, sculpture, architecture, biology, daily life. All these areas of measurements and calculations are accurate. Even in nature, everything follows a precise pattern and a precise order: a flower, a shell, a butterfly, day and night, the seasons. All this makes mathematics essential for human life and they can not be limited only to a matter within the school curriculum; here lies the importance of teaching math in a pleasure, enjoyable and understandable way. Mathematics is an aid to the development of the child and should be seen as an aid to life and not as an obstacle in their lifes.

Mathematics is the one of the most important subjects in our daily life and in most human activities the knowledge of mathematics is important. In the rapidly changing world and in the era of technology, mathematics plays an essential role. To understand the mechanized world and match with the newly developing information technology knowledge in mathematics is vital. Mathematics is the mother of all sciences. Without the knowledge of mathematics, nothing is possible in the world. The world cannot progress without mathematics. Mathematics fulfills most of the human needs related to diverse aspects of everyday life. Mathematics has been accepted as significant element of formal education from ancient period to the present day. Mathematics has a very important role in the classroom not only because of the relevance of the syllabus material, but because of the reasoning processes the student can develop.