The History of Mathematics

Under an ahistorical program for mathematics, it is unnecessarily hard for students to grasp concepts. Mathematics is not a sphere of thought that is disconnected from the real world. As part of the real world, mathematics has grown through time; mathematics therefore has a history.

There were hardly any ‘a-ha!’ moments in mathematicians minds, there was only the fitting together of puzzles that showed how the world really worked.

This is how Euclid created a Dodecahedron using a cube and pentagons. Amazing! A Dodecahedron suddenly seems much less complex, much less scary, because now it is the construction of a couple familiar shapes being joined together. Of course, after the basic construction is complete, we can now run with this new shape and find out all sorts of things about our world that we previously didn’t know. New rules, new formulas.. but they are all still very much based on the conjunction of the two basic shapes.

This necessity for simplification for understanding is why I will post on the history of mathematics and attempt to delineate the implications of the past.

I am a mathematics student, with minors in education, political science, and computer science.

These four areas may seem rather disconnected, but in fact they are all tied together empirically through the fact that they all affect human society.