This interesting video was posted yesterday on the BC Association of Mathematics Teachers’ (BCAMT) list serve (thanks Kelvin Dueck) and I thought I would post it here on the blog. It begins with the earliest discovery of “math” and moves quickly through some of the major developments in mathematics through the time of Archimedes. It touches on base 60 (Babylonians & Sumarians), early approximations of pi, simple fractions (from the Egyptians), square roots, magic squares, the Pythagorean theorem, prime numbers , the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic or prime factorization, using the the sieve of Eratosthenes to find smaller prime numbers. Maybe some of the ideas will be “Greek” to you, but then again, maybe it will spark a bit of curiosity, too!
Mathematically yours,
Carollee
