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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Ways Of Relating To The Mathematics Of The Past, Michael N. Fried
Ways Of Relating To The Mathematics Of The Past, Michael N. Fried
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
Historians of mathematics, by definition, look at mathematics of the past. But mathematicians, too, often look at mathematics of the past; mathematicians of the past themselves often looked very closely at mathematics of their own past. Is their relationship to the past the same as that of the historians? Is every view of the past an historical view? Indeed, is every historical view historical in the same way? Or is it possible that there are different kinds of relationships to the mathematics of the past? This paper will suggest that there are in fact a variety of such relationships. It …
How To Calculate Π: Machin's Inverse Tangents, A Mini-Primary Source Project For Calculus Ii Students, Dominic Klyve
How To Calculate Π: Machin's Inverse Tangents, A Mini-Primary Source Project For Calculus Ii Students, Dominic Klyve
Mathematics Faculty Scholarship
Almost every mathematical culture through history seems to have proved, trusted, or suspected that the area of a circle is a fixed constant times the square of its radius. It is maybe not surprising, then, that the last two millennia have seen a seemingly endless array of attempts to calculate this constant (today usually called π" role="presentation">π) with increasing precision.