Course and Blog Reflection

 Since reading through all of my previous blog posts it is clear that my idea of math history has changed over the past few months. At the beginning of the term, I thought of the history of math very linearly, but now it is clear that is not true. The history of math is very intertwined, with similar discoveries being made by different civilizations at different times. The true origins of these discoveries also heavily depends on who you ask, which I find very interesting. The one thing that has stayed constant, however, is my stance on the role of math history in the math classroom. I still believe that there is already way too much content in highschool math and that learning math history would over-complicate already complicated concepts. That doesn't mean that I don't think math history is important, because I do, I simply do not think that the high school math class is the proper arena for the subject. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this class, it was a very pleasant change of pace from my typical Sauder courses, but all classes can be improved. My biggest critique would be the blog-format, I enjoyed creating blogs but it was hard to keep up-to-date on assignments when all of my class due dates and reminders are on canvas and one class had it on blogger. I think it would be a lot easier for non-education students to navigate the course if assignments and due dates were posted on canvas. 

I would like to thank Susan and all the students in the class for making this class so much fun and so informative! 

Assignment 3 Reflection

 Assignment Three was extremely fun for me. It gave me the opportunity to learn about the history of Coding together with two of my best friends. Coding and computer science have become increasingly important in recent years, even for myself, in finance, computer science will play a large role in my career. Not only will I need to understand computer science to effectively evaluate tech companies, but a lot of my day-to-day tasks will become automated with the help of computer science as well. My main takeaways from this assignment were:

1) The history of coding is incredibly intertwined

    i) The main languages of coding today have built upon the previous coding languages

2) There are only a few main players in the history of coding

    i) You see a lot of familiar faces in the history of coding, Bill Gates, Oracle, Nokia, IBM, etc.

3) The history of coding is incredibly young

    i) Unlike most other mathematics subjects, coding only really started to gain traction in the 1950s.

4) The history of coding is a lot more privatized than other math histories

    i) The history of most math subjects is largely dominated by scholars and academics, not coding though.         The history of coding is dominated by private companies that are worth billions of dollars.  

 

The History of Coding

The topic that our group decided to research is the history of coding and computer algorithms. What we noticed right away is that the history of programming languages has a couple key trends that we wanted to highlight through our format. Those trends are that, as with every other topic we have learned about throughout the semester, each succeeding programming language is influenced by or improves on a previous language in some way and that the core concept of coding is to make tasks increasingly simple and efficient. Furthermore, unlike many of the typical mathematics concepts, the development of coding has been rapid and is continuing to accelerate.  We also realize that computer programming is a quite recent development with the first programming language being in 1854, but the more significant advancements beginning in 1956 – less than 100 years ago. Given this, in addition to informing through the introduction of how and when each programming language was developed, we also wanted to highlight how quick the evolution has been and show how each language has been a building-block to its successors. Examples of this would be the development of Python, which is a successor to the ABC programming language or C++, which is an extension of the previously introduced C.

We found that these trends become obvious as we explore the progression of programming languages through time and that each advancement is quickly overshadowed or replaced by another. For this reason, we decided to keep the scope of our project very broad and display our findings through a roadmap that walks us through the history of coding. This way, we get to learn how coding has developed and the aforementioned trends will come to light as we move through time - the progression of coding has been swift, languages take ideas from previous ones and each succeeding language strives to become more simple.  We hope that this way, we will be able to cover the high-level important events in the history of coding while also highlighting how each event ties into each other. 

https://prezi.com/elxw8xbxtwxd/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

Assignment #3 Outline

Topic: History of Coding and Computer Algorithms

Format: Visual Road Map

Bibliography: 

Bureau, T. G. (2020, November 5). Ada Lovelace Day: Commemorating the world's first computer programmer. TechGig. https://content.techgig.com/ada-lovelace-day-commemorating-the-worlds-first-computer-programmer/articleshow/78642521.cms

Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. IBM develops FORTRAN. Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/technology/computer/IBM-develops-FORTRAN

Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. LISP. Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/technology/LISP-computer-language

Hayward, D. (2020, October 7). A Brief History of Coding - BDM Tech Guides. BDM Publications. https://bdmpublications.com/brief-history-coding/

The History of Visual Basic. http://www.johnsmiley.com/visualbasic/vbhistory.htm

History - Open Dylan. https://opendylan.org/history/index.html

How Alan Turing Cracked The Enigma Code. Imperial War Museums. https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/how-alan-turing-cracked-the-enigma-code

McCracken, H. (2014, April 29). Fifty Years of BASIC, the Language That Made Computers Personal. Time. https://time.com/69316/basic/

McFadden, C. (2020, September 5). The Origin of Algorithms We Use Every Single Day. Interesting Engineering. https://interestingengineering.com/origin-algorithms-use-every-day

Mkhitaryan, A. (2017, October 13). Why Is C# Among The Most Popular Programming Languages in The World? Medium. https://medium.com/sololearn/why-is-c-among-the-most-popular-programming-languages-in-the-world-ccf26824ffcb

Python History - javatpoint. www.javatpoint.com. https://www.javatpoint.com/python-history.

The rise of C++. Nokia Bell Labs. http://www.bell-labs.com/about/history/innovation-stories/rise-c-plus-plus/

Nasar, Audrey A. (2016) "The history of Algorithmic complexity," The Mathematics Enthusiast: Vol. 13: No. 3 , Article 4. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/tme/vol13/iss3/4

The Golden Age of Medieval Islam

 One thing that I found very interesting from this reading was the inception of the word "algorithm". I had never put much thought into where the word came from, so it was interesting to find out. Apparently al-Khwarizmi's book "The Book of Addition and Subtraction According to the Hindu Calculation" was so important that it was the first Arabic math book to be translated into Latin. Today the word "algorithm" is used to describe the act of calculating something, but it is derived from the Latin interpretation of al-Khwarizmi to "algorismi". 

It was also very interesting to learn about al-Khayyami's achievements with ratios. Specifically, I had no idea that his view of the ratio of the diagonal of a square to the side (sqrt 2) or the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter (pi) eventually lead to the introduction of positive real numbers. This is an achievement that has surely stood the test of time because we are still using positive real numbers today. 

Finally, it would be impossible not to mention al-Kashi's correct calculation of 2pi to 16 decimal places. Calculating the perimeters of inscribed and circumscribed polygons in a given circle having 805,306,368 sides. He even went as far as to describe how close he wanted his approximation to be and was correct. The time and effort that he put into this calculation show the true dedication that he had to his craft. 

Trivium & Quadtrivium

"Numbers were identified with the various gods. He considered odd numbers to be male and the even ones to be female."

I found this to be very interesting and it made me wonder what the thought process was here. This is obviously me stereotyping, but generally, speaking girls are better behaved in grade school. Once both genders are grown up I think it evens out a bit but during school, it is almost always the boys that give teachers a hard time. This is why this analogy makes sense to me, with boys being slightly more "odd" and less put together and females being more "even" and polished. 

"To qualify for a degree, he was required to participate in public disputations, either defending a proposition or opposing one defended by another student"

There was a couple of things that I found interesting. Firstly the use of the word "he" because back then university was only provided to men and not women, that is certainly one aspect that the modern university has changed for the better. Secondly, I find it interesting that the university used to require students to argue their opinions. I feel that this is something lacking from the modern university, where at times it feels like students are just being graded on their ability to memorize facts and figures. 

"education as the sole occupation of the first thirty-five years of a man's life. He would have the first twenty years spent on gymnastics, music, and grammar, the next ten on arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and harmony, and the next five on philosophy. "

This was an opinion of Plato's. The first thing that sticks out to me is the subjects that he chose, particularly gymnastics and music. It is clear that Plato believed that a man should focus the majority of his education on the arts, which I found interesting. Additionally, this is a very long time! I have been in school for sixteen years and that is already a long time. On paper, it would appear that Plato's theory would result in a well-educated, more successful society, but I am not sure that is the case. My opinion is that the economy would suffer because people aren't entering the workforce until a later age and because there is no diversity of knowledge. Yes, a university education is important, but we also need trades workers and I don't think philosophy and astronomy are very important for those roles. 

False Position

My word problem: Two of a number and its square root are equaled to 36.




2x + √x = 36

Try 4: 2(4) + √4 =

8 + 1 = 9

36/9 = 4, therefore multiple 4 by 4

2(16) + √16 =

32 + 4 = 36




It worked!