Why teach history of Math?

 Hi everyone

 For many students, math is difficult and boring because students work a lot with numbers, formulars or sometimes they need to remember these formulars. Actually, in order to have these formulars and knowledge of math, many mathematicians spent many years to discover them. History of math is important for both teachers and students. If the students ask the teachers where this math knowledge comes from, the teachers will answer this question easily if they know about the history of this knowledge. Knowledge of math comes from our real life. Knowing the history of math knowledge makes us more “emotional” and understand about that knowledge. For example, number 0 is a number, but for me – a teacher, number 0 is a wonderful number because I know about the history of this number.

“[H]istorically inspired exercises may stimulate the student’s interest and contribute to curricular enhancement alongside those exercises and problem which may seem more artificially designed.” (p.204-205) I agree with this idea; however, this activity will take a lot of time and the curriculum in BC does not allow thus activity happen. The teacher is not be prepared to teach the history of math.

Learning math history is not only benefit for student but also benefit for teacher. Knowing the math history helps the learners have deeper understanding about the knowledge. I still do not understand the sentence “history may enter either explicitly or implicitly” (p.209),

“[T]he teacher has the opportunity to compare modem mathematics with its form in the past (notation, terminology, methods of proof and of computation, etc). Presentation of aspects of this comparison may be beneficial for the students” (p.211). This idea is good but it is not practical because the teacher needs to use all the notation in the book, if not the students will be confused about what is the right notation which they will use when they do their homework.

          After reading this article, I understand that learning history of math helps students develop “personal growth and skills” (p.205). Normally, I just think that history of math only helps student understand about the original of the structure or the formular.