My thoughts on Babylonian Word Problems article

 The chapter about Babylonian word problem from the book A Man Left Albuquerque Heading East (written by our lovely Susan) showed a fascinating history about this genre of math problems. In contrast with the recent math curriculum, they share the trait of the problems being somewhat absurd and unrealistic. In both eras, the word problems seems to be a tool for student's instrumental understanding. Questions related a multiple-storey tall stack of grain pile or value difference and multiples in father/son age are for apprentices/students to solve just because they can.

My guess on the unrealistic nature of these questions are two pronged. Authors of the questions realized any real-world application requires tangible context. However, society advances and context changes, it's futile to change the question every time society moves forward. Hence, a choice of surreal context has been made for Babylonian and 21st century Math students alike. The other point is that the emphasis was on the deciphering and modelling of math from written language, having absurd context allows more flexibility in the setup of said questions.

Finally, the article mentions that ancient Babylonian chose the word problems as the discourse for math. I believe it's a way to have people learn through straightforward yet unrealistic question before the the theoretical discourse with so-called 'mathematician' at the time. At that time, these word problems are likely a good method to filter out citizens incapable of computation in that era.

Comments

  1. Susan GerofskyNovember 3, 2024 at 10:32 PM

    The 'filtering' function is a bit nefarious, both in ancient and modern times, in my opinion! It does exist though -- especially in certain US college entrance exams, and even in IQ tests!

    ReplyDelete

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