Wednesday 11 July, 2007

Story telling


Story telling is a strategy which could help math teachers to bind students close to mathematics.There are various true tales/anecdotes of mathematicians which could add a long lasting impact on students to explore mathematics deeply. In my free periods as well as in class teacher period or in House meetings I am using this strategy of story telling.
Here I am sharing some incidents about a famous Mathematician Gauss.
Gauss was a child prodigy (a teenager who acclaimed success at a young age), of whom there are many anecdotes pertaining to his astounding precocity while a mere toddler, and made his first ground-breaking mathematical discoveries while still a teenager.
At the age of three he corrected, in his head, an error his father had made on paper while calculating finances.
Once in primary school his teacher, J.G. Büttner tried to occupy pupils by making them add up the integers from 1 to 100. The young Gauss produced the correct answer within seconds by a flash of mathematical insight, to the astonishment of his teacher,J.G.Buttner.
He added the integers from 1 to 100 in the following manner
S=1+2+3+4+-------------100
S=100+99+98+------------1

2S = 101+101+101+-------------101 (100 times)
S= 10100/2 = 5050.

Gauss had realized that pairwise addition of terms from opposite ends of the list yielded identical intermediate sums: 1 + 100 = 101, 2 + 99 = 101, 3 + 98 = 101, and so on.

If you are sharing some real stories of mathematicians in your classrooms ,Please do share.

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