Math Through Language & Imagery

Read any good math lately?
  


Why not use story books to present mathematical concepts? Many children need an authentic context for using mathematics. Books can be used as a nonthreatening vehicle for investigating a variety of mathematical concepts and relationships.

You may want to vistit this wonderful site:

http://www.livingmath.net/LearningIdeas/JustReadIt/tabid/269/language/en-US/Default.aspx

http://www.livingmath.net/ReaderLists/tabid/268/language/en-US/Default.aspx



"One of the earliest and most distinguished of the Arabic mathematicians was
the ninth century scholar Abu Ja'far Mohammed ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi, who was an
astronomer to the caliph at Baghdad. His name indicates that he was from the
town of Khwarizm (now Khiva), on the Amu Darya river, south of the Aral Sea in
what is now Uzbekistan. (Khwarizm was part of the Silk Route, a major trading
pathway between Europe and the East.) Al-Khwarizmi's full name can be translated
as "Father of Ja'far, Mohammed, son of Moses, native of the town of
Al-Khwarizmi".


Al-Khwarizmi wrote several books that were to be enormously influential. In
particular, his book describing how to write numbers and compute with them using
the place-value decimal system that came out of India would, when translated
into Latin three hundred years later, prove to be a major source for Europeans
who wanted to learn the new system.


In fact, Al-Khwarizmi's book on arithmetic with the Hindu-Arabic numbers was
so important, it appears to have been translated several times. Many
translations began with the phrase "dixit Algorismi" ("so says Al-Khwarizmi"), a
practice that led to the adoption in medieval times of the term
algorism to refer to the process of computing with the Hindu-Arabic
numerals. Our modern word "algorithm" is an obvious derivation from that
term.


Another of Al-Khwarizmi's manuscripts was called Kitab al jabr
w'al-muqabala, which translates roughly as "restoration and compensation".
The book is essentially an algebra text. It starts off with a discussion of
quadratic equations, then goes on to some practical geometry, followed by simple
linear equations, and ending with a long section on how to apply mathematics to
solve inheritance problems. The Englishman Robert of Chester translated
Al-Khwarizmi's algebra book from Arabic into Latin in 1145. The part dealing
with quadratic equations eventually became famous. Such was the influence of
this work that the Arabic phrase al jabr in the book's title gave rise
to our modern word "algebra".


After Al-Khwarizmi, algebra became an important part of Arabic mathematics.
Arabic mathematicians learned to manipulate polynomials, to solve certain
algebraic equations, and more. For modern readers, used to thinking of algebra
as the manipulation of symbols, it is important to realize that the Arabic
mathematicians did not use symbols at all. Everything was done in words.


One of the most famous Arabic mathematicians was 'Umar Al-Khayammi, known in
the West as Omar Khayyam, who lived approximately from 1048 to 1131. Although
remembered today primarily as a poet, in his time he was also famous as a
mathematician, scientist, and philosopher, doing major work in all those
fields.


It was largely through translations of the Arabic texts into Latin that
western Europe, freshly emerged from the Dark Ages, kick-started its mathematics
in the tenth and subsequent centuries."  -   The Math Guy