'Was Pythagoras Chinese?' - Reading and Response

Upon reading this paper, it is clear that both the Greeks and Chinese had their own mathematical discovery triumphs despite the lack of communication between both civilizations. As noted by Ross Gustafson, the Greeks were more focused on the understanding of the different proofs and how they were able to solve the different problems such as the right-angle triangle or the verification of the square root of 2 to be an irrational number. 

Even though my career doesn't involve traditional teaching, from a students perspective who has has to learn about mathematics, I will say that learning the methodology has more emphasis in school cirriculums than understanding where the actual math came from. Therefore I would make the slight comparison that the way in which we teach students mathematics today follows a similar sturcture to those of the Chinese. The texts states that the Jiu Zhang suahshu "was not to prove beyond argument the material but to guide the reader (student) on the principles so that they could master the methods for themselves", similar to modern society in early stages of learning. Due to the similarity, I think that incorporating the history of both sources would be beneficial for learning beyond just the methodology, it would also spark interest in critical thinking where students are able to acknowledge that there are mutiple methodologies to solve certain problems and that there is never just one method. 

As for the naming of mathematical theorems, it thnk that methods have been standardized and generalized to make it easier to relay / teach this information. With most things in our society, there are certain topics that gain more attention and thus, I think that some mathmeticians were able to spread their theories better than others. Even though a large protion of the world's population today is fluent in Mandarin or other variations of the Chinese language, at the time of these theorems, English was probably more dominent and therefore language barriers could have been a huge contirubtuing factor to why different theorems are named as they are. 

Comments

  1. Susan GerofskyNovember 11, 2020 at 12:42 PM

    Very nice! I like your evaluation of the idea of using both traditional Chinese and Greek methods as part of student learning, for valid reasons explained here! Good point about the dominance of certain languages and cultures at different points in history.

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