A Personal And Multicultural Journey Through The World Of Games (With A Little Math) Or Book Review: Around The World In Eighty Games, By Marcus Du Sautoy, 2024 Gordon College
A Personal And Multicultural Journey Through The World Of Games (With A Little Math) Or Book Review: Around The World In Eighty Games, By Marcus Du Sautoy, Karl-Dieter Crisman
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
Author and number theorist Marcus Du Sautoy has written a book about games, including a light dose of mathematics. In it, he journeys through far more than (his choice of) eighty of “the world’s greatest games”, laying out a charming voyage through many lands. Despite some reservations, this reviewer finds that Around the World in Eighty Games is well-written and quite fascinating, largely due to its idiosyncratic, personal nature.
Quik Church, Route 3.141592, 2024 Claremont Colleges
Quik Church, Route 3.141592, Sarah Voss
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
The following set of poems are from one of ten sections in a collection of poetry called Quik Church: Short Poems that Travel Far. Each section illustrates one of many “streets” which individuals often take on their spiritual journey through life, e.g., the Old Gods Path, Nature Trail, Memory Skyway, Mystic Avenue, Pastoral Lane, and so on. This one, Route 3.141592, is the route of mathematics and the science that depends on mathematics.
Hockey Card Statistics Are Stagnant And Stale, 2024 University of Saskatchewan
Hockey Card Statistics Are Stagnant And Stale, Egan J. Chernoff
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
The purchase of a coffee at a Canadian institution, Tim Hortons, turned into an informal investigation into hockey card statistics. Turns out, hockey card statistics are stagnant and stale. This was disappointing to see because the game of hockey has changed, the statistics used to keep track of the game have changed. Even the cards have changed. Well, not the back of the cards, which do not well enough paint a statistical picture of the hockey player photographed on the front of the card.
The Limits Of Data Science, 2024 Claremont Graduate University
The Limits Of Data Science, David E. Drew
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
Data science can contribute valuable predictions in diverse fields. But I write to express some concerns and red flags. I suggest that data science is being oversold. This article contains three questions that I believe data science must address as this new discipline matures. Is data science significantly different from statistics? This is a question that has haunted the field since the term first was introduced. By creating algorithms based on current societal decision rules that may be biased, even bigoted, does data science lock in and exacerbate inequality? Scholars have identified a continuum from data to information to knowledge …
Polygon Quadrature And Dodecagonal Tessellation With Pattern Blocks, 2024 New Jersey City University
Polygon Quadrature And Dodecagonal Tessellation With Pattern Blocks, Gunhan Caglayan, Ben Kamau
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
The age-old challenge of polygon quadrature involves converting a polygon into a square of equal area. In this educational resource, we utilize pattern blocks, commonly employed instructional aids in K-12 education across the United States, to visually demonstrate the transformation of different equilateral and regular pattern block polygons into squares. This is achieved through the application of the area conservation principle and geometric congruence/similarity reasoning.
Reflections On Teaching Mathematics In Prisons, 2024 CUNY Baruch College
Reflections On Teaching Mathematics In Prisons, Matthew Junge
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
I started teaching math in prison ten years ago during my PhD studies. Since then, I have taught for three different college-in-prison programs across the country. The goal of this piece is to communicate my experiences with the hopes of encouraging more mathematicians to get involved.
Benefits Of Risk-Taking In Teaching Mathematics, 2024 Texas State University
Benefits Of Risk-Taking In Teaching Mathematics, Mehmet Kirmizi, Abigail Quansah, Zafer Buber
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
In this paper, we, a group of graduate students in mathematics education, discuss some of the metacognitive benefits of the non-traditional teaching methods we observed employed by one of our professors. This professor’s methods challenge the common belief that well-managed class time is key for positive learning outcomes. Instead, he orients his teaching to share the exploration and sense-making phases of doing mathematics. The goal of his teaching is to share the idea that learning mathematics is a process of “refining our mathematical thinking”. We argue that this approach to teaching helps students see that mathematics is a human endeavor, …
The Frankensteinian Nature Of Mathematics, 2024 Department of Mathematics, Hamedan Branch, Islamic Azad University, Hamedan, Iran
The Frankensteinian Nature Of Mathematics, Ali Barahmand
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
Frankenstein is a story about a scientist who creates a sapient creature that gets out of control and horrifies its creator by its unexpected behavior. In this note, we show that this type of undesirable behavior can reflect a part of the nature of mathematics, and that its origin is related to the ontological question of whether mathematics is invented or discovered. Based on a review of the relationship be- tween discovery and invention, we demonstrate that mathematics has similarities and differences with both discovery and invention. In the natural sciences, new instruments have to be invented to discover new …
Does Chatgpt Know Calculus?, 2024 St. John Fisher University
Does Chatgpt Know Calculus?, Kris H. Green
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
Academics and educators across the world are grappling with how OpenAI’s new software, ChatGPT, will impact teaching and learning. This essay explores ChatGPT’s response to a typical calculus problem as a way of illustrating its functionality and limitations.
Seating Groups And 'What A Coincidence!': Mathematics In The Making And How It Gets Presented, 2024 Sheffield Hallam University
Seating Groups And 'What A Coincidence!': Mathematics In The Making And How It Gets Presented, Peter J. Rowlett
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
Mathematics is often presented as a neatly polished finished product, yet its development is messy and often full of mis-steps that could have been avoided with hindsight. An experience with a puzzle illustrates this conflict. The puzzle asks for the probability that a group of four and a group of two are seated adjacently within a hundred seats, and is solved using combinatorics techniques.
Logical Or Epistemological? A Study On Kepler’S 3m Cosmological Model, 2024 National Chin-Yi University of Technology
Logical Or Epistemological? A Study On Kepler’S 3m Cosmological Model, Po-Hung Liu
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
Kepler published Mysterium Cosmographicum in 1597 constructing his cosmo- logical model based on the five regular polyhedra. Such a creative but weird idea was almost consistent with empirical evidence. Furthermore, following the Pythagorean belief about the connection between music and astronomy, Kepler delved into looking for what things having to do with the planetary movements have the harmonic consonances. This article claims that Kepler’s model is a 3M (mathematical, musical, and metaphysical) model and demonstrates how it had been constructed. Furthermore, I explore the reasons behind Kepler’s departure from the 3M model and his subsequent consideration of a non-circular orbit, …
On Parallels Between Words And Music, 2024 University of Aberdeen, Scotland
On Parallels Between Words And Music, Will Turner
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
A generalised song is a means of drawing parallels between words and music. The parallels are encoded in a mathematical structure, which is interpreted in a verbal structure and a musical structure. Here we develop a number of new techniques for drawing such parallels, in giving two examples of generalised songs, `Relation', and `Merge/Split'.
The first five partials of a note played on a piano are roughly 0,12,19,24,28 semitones above the fundamental.`Relation' is a generalised song, whose musical part is played on a piano, constructed from the mathematical relation 4.28 = 3.12 + 4.19.
`Merge/Split' is a generalised song whose …
Undergraduate Mathematics Students Question And Critique Society Through Mathematical Modeling, 2024 Morehead State University
Undergraduate Mathematics Students Question And Critique Society Through Mathematical Modeling, Will Tidwell, Amy Bennett
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
Mathematics can be used as a tool to question and critique society and, in doing so, give us more information about the world around us and how it operates. This however, is not a common perspective that is conveyed to students during their undergraduate mathematics coursework. This paper contributes to the understanding of how undergraduate mathematics students question and critique society via mathematical modeling tasks. In two courses at two universities, 27 mathematics majors and secondary preservice teachers engaged in the modeling process situated in authentic contexts to learn specific concepts and make mathematical connections across domains and disciplines. Both …
Aesthetic Approaches To Symmetric Functions, 2024 Toronto Metropolitan University
Aesthetic Approaches To Symmetric Functions, John M. Campbell
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
Symmetry is often regarded as an integral aspect about aesthetics. This motivates the pursuit of interdisciplinary studies based on the use of subjects in mathematics concerned with symmetry in conjunction with aesthetics. What is referred to as a symmetric function in the field of algebraic combinatorics is an abstraction based on polynomials that exhibit a symmetric property, and this leads us to pursue an algebraic combinatorics-inspired exploration based on aesthetics. In particular, we use different bases and transitions between them to create aesthetically pleasing visualizations of symmetric functions. We see that these visualizations in turn raise new and interesting questions.
Mathematicians Going East, 2024 University of Ostrava
Mathematicians Going East, Pasha Zusmanovich
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
I survey emigration of mathematicians from Europe, before and during WWII, to Russia. The emigration started at the end of 1920s, the time of “Great Break”, and accelerated in 1930s, after the introduction in Germany of the “non-Aryan laws”. Not everyone who wanted to emigrate managed to do so, and most of those who did spent a relatively short time in Russia, being murdered or deported, or fleeing the Russian regime. After 1937, the year of “Great Purge”, only a handful of emigrant mathematicians remained, and even fewer managed to leave a trace in the scientific milieu of their new …
Sharing Four Biscuits Between Three People: An Illustrative Example Of How Mathematics Is Intertwined With Human Values, 2024 Stockholm University
Sharing Four Biscuits Between Three People: An Illustrative Example Of How Mathematics Is Intertwined With Human Values, Lovisa Sumpter, David Sumpter
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
Despite convincing arguments by mathematicians, philosophers, sociologists and machine learning practitioners to the contrary, there remains a widespread notion amongst many members of the general public (and some practitioners) that mathematics is neutral, that it is free from human values. One reason why this notion persists is that we lack clear-cut examples that demonstrate how mathematics and values are intertwined. In this paper, we offer one such example. In particular, we show that when sharing four biscuits between three people, several possible mathematical and ethical frameworks can be used. We demonstrate that different solutions—hiding one biscuit, arbitrarily sharing the extra …
The Automathography: A Humanistic Autobiographical Writing Assignment For Mathematics Courses, 2024 Fort Lewis College
The Automathography: A Humanistic Autobiographical Writing Assignment For Mathematics Courses, Colton Sawyer, Ron Buckmire
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
In this article, we discuss an autobiographical writing assignment that we call an “automathography” which can be used in different types of mathematics and mathematics education courses, and by extension, in other disciplines as well. This assignment can enhance student-instructor interactions, develop student communication skills, and provide outlets for student creativity by leveraging the lived experiences of students. We have deployed the assignment in different kinds of classes (general education [service] courses and major-only seminars) at different kinds of institutions (a private, open-admission, large university on the East Coast and a private, highly selective, small liberal arts college on the …
Gödel's Theorem In The Continuing Education Of Mathematics Teachers, 2024 University of Lille
Gödel's Theorem In The Continuing Education Of Mathematics Teachers, Ana J. Lemes
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
The notion of dépaysement épistémologique (epistemological disorientation) aims to capture the sense of disorientation when a learner is led to question their prior assumptions and understandings, generating uncertainty in a context in which they thought they had certain knowledge. This article describes an activity used with a group of practicing mathematics teachers in Uruguay that integrates elements of the history of mathematics related to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, with the aim of provoking in the participants the experience of dépaysement épistémologique. Results show that several of the teachers participating in the activity felt dépaysement épistémologique, and this feeling triggered …
Finding Your Mathematical Roots: Inclusion And Identity Development In Mathematics, 2024 Muhlenberg College
Finding Your Mathematical Roots: Inclusion And Identity Development In Mathematics, Linda Mcguire
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
This paper details a semester-long course project that has been successfully adapted for use in mathematics courses ranging from introductory level, general-education classes to advanced courses in the mathematics major. Through creating aspirational mathematical family trees and writing mathematical autobiographies, this assignment is designed to help battle belonging uncertainty, to challenge students to self-situate in relation to the history of mathematical and scientific knowledge, and to make visible a student’s developing identity in mathematics and, more broadly, in STEM.
The construction and scaffolding of the project, assignments, examples of student work, foundational readings, assessment and outcomes, and adaptation strategies for …
Our Histories, Our Values, Our Mathematics, 2024 Claremont McKenna College
Our Histories, Our Values, Our Mathematics, Mark Huber, Gizem Karaali
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
No abstract provided.