Zain Rehmtulla

 I enjoyed working on assignment #3 quite a bit.  Initially, Tage and I had different idea. I was very interested in sacred geometry. For example, the idea of trinity in Nature and how many life forms have a 3 part structure. (butterflies, insects etc.) However, his idea of the painting using the square root of 2 and irrationality led me to believe that I could still include some sort of geometrical idea and explain the origins of the pythagorean theorem.  For me, my perspective on numbers changed a lot. I think I became more philosophical as a result of reading into what numbers actually represent. It was really interesting to see the connections between numbers and music in particular. In particular, the ratio of the length impacting the sound emancipating out of different instruments struck me in the sense that the octave, the fourth, and fifth can be combined in some way to generate many more sounds and combinations of numbers. Therefore, Pythagoras was able to ...

 Reflection on course: After re-reading my blog posts and perhaps reconsidering some of my opinions, I’ve come to appreciate just how much math history has influenced mathematics today. In fact, as I was preparing a unit plan, I found videos that connect to today’s math curriculum and the entire video database includes math history. My first takeaway is how mathematics can be traced back to it’s origins and different civilizations to explain it’s use in society. For example, analyzing the weight scale problem helped me realize that mathematics can be used to solve problems when technologies like the weight scales today are not yet created. I’m certain that the idea of powers of 3 and powers of 2 have many applications beyond weight scale measurement. Secondly, looking at the different base systems, whether it is the base 60 system from the babylonians (sexagesimal), the base 20 system (vigesmal) from the mayans, helped me realize the benefit of looking at mathematics or probl...