When I close my eyes and go back in time, I see a college student sitting in the back row and looking sad while the professor is standing next to the chalkboard, writing mathematical definitions on it with chalk. The click, click, click sound was still obvious every time the professor wrote on the blackboard. Then, the student goes into deep thought when the professor said:
“For every epsilon greater than 0 [ε>0], there exists a delta greater than 0. [ δ>0]”
Upon hearing this, the student asked himself repeatedly: What does epsilon mean? That student actually was me. Although…
On a snowy day in London, as he was lying in bed and gazing at the ceiling, Sherlock Holmes’ mind was once again at work trying to crack yet another case. It wasn’t long before Dr. Watson came knocking at the door and described to him a most peculiar murder case. Sherlock at first paid no attention to any of what Watson had to say. However, when Watson told him of the tracks from the bicycle with which the culprit had made his getaway, Sherlock suddenly turned to him and said, “well, now, why don’t we have a look at…
One of the significant losses in this day and age is how unexcited we are about everything. Many people seem not to be affected by discoveries and information, which is one thing that Georg Cantor was very diligent in avoiding. He seldom lost his excitement for anything. Prime examples of this include how one day when he was in deep thought, he realized that any line segment’s points match all points of three-dimensional space. Realizing this, he immediately sent a note to one of the only people that could correctly understand this, his friend Julies Dedekind, saying:
“Je le vois…
I have been working in the field of education for almost a decade. My teaching experience showed me that if we do not find the most efficient way to teach mathematics to our students, we cannot be good educators no matter how hard we try.
What I learned from my students is that they love playing games. A good math game can make the kids learn in a more fun and interactive way. Since then, I have been trying to find some cool math games that I can use in my classroom.
I have curated some of my favorite math…
Sometimes I find myself thinking, what if we did not have the unique number “pi”? Probably, everything would change. Our beautiful mathematics turn strange; maybe even the earth would go awry and wouldn’t orbit the sun. If the world is still not so bad, it is because of that notorious constant number pi.
By the way, I assumed we all know what pi is since middle school. Our teacher showed us that “pi” (π) is an irrational number, which is the ratio of a circle’s circumference (2πr) to its diameter (2r). In other words, when you measure a circular object…
Before starting my mathematics education, rain was a significant natural occurrence for me. Right after the rain had ended, I would run to the streets and put the paper boat that my father would make for me into the side of our street where water had collected. In my university life, my favorite pastime was riding my bike in the rain. I learned to love birds while they were drinking the rainwater in the bucket my grandmother had set up for them. Getting wet in the rain was never a problem in my life. …
I remember that my mathematical education has started with numbers. First, my father, then later, my elementary teacher, taught me how to count as my elementary math education. However, 2400 years ago, everything was utterly different, and kids were taught geometry first.
Before Jesus, geometry was more important than numbers. For instance, when the founder of the first institution of higher education in the Western world, Plato, came back to Athens, he decided to found the “Academy” where it would be the intellectual center of the world (Wikipedia, “Plato”). For that purpose, instead of taking a nonrefundable application fee, he…
We are very near the end of the turning point in our lives, which was the advent of YouTube on February 14th, 2005. Due to the people who run the world being devoid of mathematical and logical thinking, the long-overdue fundamental change to the education system is now being forced to come to fruition by an invisible virus and fate.
In the near future, we will be able to provide the tools and opportunities for a generation to learn of its own volition versus forcing education down its throat in cramped classrooms that barely have the oxygen level sufficient for…
Today we will try to understand numbers starting with natural numbers. When we say “understand numbers,” you may get the idea that numbers physically exist, and we want to understand those objects. For this reason, we should focus on what does “understanding numbers” mean? What can we understand about numbers? How much can we really understand numbers? How do we know that we really understand something like numbers? What is the type of understanding we have (for something like numbers)? We will focus on these questions from a profoundly philosophical perspective.
Is there any difference between understanding numbers and understanding…
As humans, despite numerous things to fascinate us, we always become shocked when we meet someone who shares the same birthday as us. While this level of surprise may come across as understandable if you are one of two people in a given setting, it wouldn’t be so if you were one student among 23 in a classroom, or one of 23 people in a cafe you’ve sat in to drink a hot chocolate or peach-mango tea, or one of the 23 people on the Argentinian national team for the 2022 World Cup. That is because math tells us that…
Math Teacher. Content Curator. Soccer player. Maradona fan. Mostly write about the lectures I love to learn better. alikayaspor@gmail.com