10 Great Revolutions in Mathematics: Suggestsion for Engaging Math Students

G4G15

10 Great Revolutions in Mathematics: Suggestsion for Engaging Math Students

David Albert

Rec Math

How to engage middle-school and high-school students in mathematics has long been a topic of interest to math teachers. The traditional curriculum is often seen as dry, boring, and irrelevant by those students who have not already been exposed to mathematics recreationally and historically. An alternative approach may help to pique the interest of additional students. This paper suggests several topics in mathematical history, each of which can be the focus of many productive days of exploration at the middle-school and high-school level. For the sake of time I have had to make hard choices, so this paper focuses on a much smaller set of topics than I wish I could include: Counting; Place Value; the Pythagorean Theorem, Fermat’s Last Theorem; the Goldbach Conjecture; Sizes of Infinity; Irrational Numbers; One-Way Cryptographic Functions, Pascal’s Triangle; and Fractals.

G15-018-1