My new math experience (early 1970s in school) was characterized by endless rehashings of the distributive and associative laws for * and +. Bases other than 10 were paid their respects, but always as second class citizens. I remember pondering whether a number would still be a prime number when written in some other base. I decided eventually that it wouldn't matter how you wrote it. I tried to explain my great discovery and was encouraged to return to my distributive law and associative law worksheet. Thane Plambeck 650 321 4884 office 650 323 4928 fax http://www.qxmail.com/ehome.htm
On Tuesday, October 28, 2003, at 01:56 AM, Thane Plambeck wrote:
Bases other than 10 were paid their respects, but always as second class citizens.
In defense of New Math -- which I agree shouldn't be given much, but seems rather beaten up around now -- let me mention that I'm teaching a freshman seminar this semester which is a humanities class (that's another story!), but I wanted to make use of binary at some point. It turns out that out of my 18 students, only four had a general idea of what binary (or a "base" at all) was, and none of them thought "write this number in binary" was a well-known operation. (Jessica tells me this has more to do with the fact that high school level computer classes no longer teach about bits and bytes but work on a higher level of abstraction, so maybe my connecting it to New Math is overzealous...) --Michael Kleber kleber@brandeis.edu
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