Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
The most basic mathematical idea ?
Posted by: Gary Ernest Davis on: January 24, 2010
My ex-wife used to wonder what was the difficulty in forming, or talking about, the set of all natural numbers. This was not a reason for our eventual separation.  It did, however, cause her some angst in wondering why we can’t just imagine all the counting numbers bundled together in a set: $latex \{1, 2, […]
Beginner's mind: seeing the mathematics
Posted by: Gary Ernest Davis on: January 22, 2010
My colleague has a Ph.D. in mathematics and two young children – 9 and 11 years of age. She writes the following account of her children’s engagement with a word problem: Yesterday my 9 year old was struggling with the following problem: “Suzi and Joey had the same amount of money. Then they went shopping. […]
