Numerals and Teachery Things

I took out the book The Abacus: a pocket computer from the library (because my brother had gotten me an abacus for my 18th birthday, or Christmas, I forget). In the chapter "The Ancients", it discusses ancient number systems, most of which I'd already heard about in "Mathematical Sorcery".


There was an explanation of Babylonian numerals and Egyptian numerals, as well as others; but what I didn't know was the meaning behind the Egyptian numerals, and this book explained some.

After some quick Googling, I've found three slightly different interpretations of the symbols:

1. http://members.tripod.com/kangwei1a14/egyptian.htm
2. http://www.recoveredscience.com/const102egynumerals1.htm
3. this book.

Picture	Explanation 1	Explanation 2	Explanation 3
	A rod.	Upright.	"just a vertical stroke, not much different from [our 'one']."
	Cattle hobble.	Vault.	Heel bone.
	Coiled Rope.	Rope coil.	Scroll.
	Lotus flower.	Lotus.	Lotus flower, "a plant the Egyptians loved."
	Finger.	Finger.	(None)
	Tadpole.	Tadpole.	(None)
	God with raised arms.	Heh-god.	"a man holding up his arms in amazement. To the Egyptians, one million was a tremendous sum."

Awkward sidenote

My good friend Mark told me about this assignment he had (a long time ago), to convert Babylonian numerals into Greek or Roman or something. When converted, the numbers spelled out the words "clitoris", "penis" and "airplane", which confused the heck out of him!

Aren't numerals fun?



I watched the movie Proof last night.

It sucked. It was almost good, and maybe if it hadn't been so "Hollywood", it would have been better; but it truly, truly sucked. Also, movies in which getting it on is part of the actual plot tend to suck.

Plot summary:

• Girl thinks she's crazy, because her dad was a crazy mathematician, now deceased.
  
• Boy is going through the deceased dad's work.
  
• Boy and girl have sex.
  
• Girl has a proof she wrote, but nobody believes she wrote it, not even the boy.
  
• Drama!
  
• Turns out, she wrote it; and maybe she's not crazy after all!
  
• Reconciliation with boy!

Did I mention the movie sucked?



Teaching

As usual, Saturday was another day of TA-ing for the Maths school. We've started on Trigonometric Identities, and I don't think the teacher adequately taught what an identity is; nor what a proof is. He later asked if this was too easy or too hard, and nobody responded.

Sometimes, I want to just jump in front of the class and tell him to shut up, and start teaching. But, the principal must have hired him as a teacher (instead of me) for a reason... At least, I hope there was a reason other than "he's older, so he'll be the teacher."

I think we should walk the kids through what an identity is; walk them through a few proofs. I'm marking their papers, and I can tell that a few just have no idea what's going on. Someone wrote "1 / 0.5" as a final answer, which is wrong on so many levels!


The format I'd like my students' work to follow

Question number. Question

Work Work Work

/ Side computations / Side computations

Answer

That would be just amazing and so much easier to mark. Maybe I'll have to make photocopies from now on, just so it's easier to explain this to them. Yeah, I'll do that--I'm going to do that RIGHT NOW!

--Charissa!