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Re[2]: [MATHEDU] Slide rules: useful tool or affectation?
Posted:
May 31, 2002 5:35 PM
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And then there are the fingers.
-Jerry
At 12:26 AM -0400 5/31/02, Brian M. Scott wrote:
>At 1:43:05 PM on Thursday, May 30, 2002, Ralph A. Raimi wrote:
>
>[...]
>
>> Teaching the slide rule and its rationale in earlier
>> grades, in high school, especially when logarithms are
>> first introduced, and trigonometry, would be a very good
>> idea. But it was not done there in *my* good old days.
>
>It was done by some high school math teachers in the early
>60s, but I don't know how widespread the practice was.
>
>[...]
>
>> A more important old tool of mathematics education, whose
>> lesson *cannot* be evaded by mere rote use, is the abacus,
>> which I constantly advocate without success, albeit for an
>> earlier stage in the life of the mind.
>
>I would probably substitute the functionally equivalent
>medieval counting board, but I agree completely with the
>sentiment. (If you are not already familiar with it, you
>might wish to try to find _The History of the Abacus_, by
>J.M. Pullan, who held the same view.)
>
--
------------------------------------------------------------------
Jerry Uhl juhl@cm.math.uiuc.edu
Professor of Mathematics, Professor of Education
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
http://www-cm.math.uiuc.edu , http://netmath.math.uiuc.edu, and
http://matheverywhere.com
"Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an
accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a
house."
-----Henri Poincare
"If the activity of a science can be supplied by a machine, that
science cannot amount to much. .
-----Felix Klein
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