I took this class in the spring of my sophomore year, and to be honest I struggled for the first half of the course. We were taught different methods used by mathematicians from different cultures at different times in history. We learned things like base 60 used by ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient Greek geometry, and different proportions from Euclid’s books. Some methods gave the wrong answer or one that was not exactly correct and this was the main reason why I struggled. I knew how to get the correct answer and the methods we were supposed to use did not really make sense to me at times. It all depended on which country we were on and their particular style; I appreciated how the Chinese computed fractions way more than Islamic spherical trigonometry. Nevertheless, I learned a lot about how mathematics was developed into what we use today.

My artifact is a page from my notes about Pascal’s Triangle and polynomials as well as how he and another mathematician figured out how to calculate the odds of a two-player game of gambling.

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