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MATHEMATICS REBOOTED
MATHEMATICS REBOOTED
A Fresh Approach to Understanding
LARA ALCOCK
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in
certain other countries
© Lara Alcock 2017
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2017
Impression: 1
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system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in
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You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue,
New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017934732
ISBN 978–0–19–252594–9
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CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
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Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website
referenced in this work.
PREFACE
Introduction
1 Multiplying
1.1 Famous theorems
1.2 Multiplication made easy
1.3 Properties of multiplication
1.4 ‘Multiplication makes things bigger’
1.5 Squares
1.6 Triangles
1.7 Pythagoras’ theorem
1.8 Pythagorean triples
1.9 Fermat’s Last Theorem
1.10 Review
2 Shapes
2.1 Tessellations
2.2 Regular polygons
2.3 Regular tessellations
2.4 Interior angles
2.5 Mathematical theory building
2.6 Semi-regular tessellations
2.7 More semi-regular tessellations
2.8 Algebra and rounding
2.9 Symmetry: Translations and rotations
2.10 Symmetry: Reflections and groups
2.11 Symmetry in other contexts
2.12 Review
3 Adding up
3.1 Infinite sums
3.2 Fractions
3.3 Adding fractions
3.4 Adding up lots of numbers
3.5 Adding up lots of odd numbers
3.6 Powers of 2
3.7 Adding up powers
3.8 The geometric series
3.9 The harmonic series
3.10 Convergence and divergence
3.11 Review
4 Graphs
4.1 Optimization
4.2 Plotting points
4.3 Plotting graphs
4.4 (or b)
4.5 More or less?
4.6 Intersecting lines
4.7 Areas and perimeters
4.8 Area formulas and graphs
4.9 Circles
4.10 Polar coordinates
4.11 Coordinates in three dimensions
4.12 Review
5 Dividing
5.1 Number systems
5.2 Dividing by 9 in base 10
5.3 If and only if
5.4 Division and decimals
5.5 Decimals and rational numbers
5.6 Lowest terms
5.7 Irrational numbers
5.8 How many rationals and irrationals?
5.9 Number systems
5.10 Review
Conclusion
Why didn’t my teachers explain it like that?
What is it all for?
What do mathematicians do?
What shall I read next?
References
Index
INTRODUCTION
Multiplying
Did you know these things already? Do you know why they are true?
We’ll revisit the second in Chapter 5, examining the reasons
carefully. For now I just want to make clear that theorems do not
have to be about esoteric concepts that no one understands. Some
are easy to understand, even if it is not easy to see why they are
true. Both Pythagoras’ Theorem and Fermat’s Last Theorem are
harder, but this chapter will work up to them, taking in numerous
elementary ideas. We’ll start right at the beginning, with
straightforward multiplication.
What I liked about this was not the counting or even the pleasing
arrangements of objects. What I liked was that by turning the page
around, you could instead see six rows of four. And the same thing
worked for five rows of seven (seven rows of five), and for two rows
of ten (ten rows of two), and for every pair of numbers in the book.
This, I thought, was brilliant. At the time I couldn’t have told you
why, but I still think it’s brilliant, and now I can: the swapping
relationship is tremendously labour-saving, and the array
representation provides insight about why it works.
The saving arises because the fact that is the same as
(and so on) means that only 55 of the first 100 multiplication facts
are really different. The memory work is not quite halved because
swapping buys us nothing for calculations like , but still that’s an
impressive reduction.
Third, the array can be treated as generic in the sense that there
is nothing special about the 4 and the 6—an array will have the
same properties for other pairs of numbers. Without needing dots on
a page, I am confident that must equal , and that
must equal . I can’t ‘see’ a row of 129 dots, and I neither
know nor care what is, but I can imagine the array and I’m
confident that whatever it is, it’s equal to . For me, the array
makes the swapping relationship obvious and therefore easy to
remember.
I do not claim, of course, that this or any other representation has
the same effect for everyone. A representation on a page is inert.
The dots just sit there, and the action takes place in the viewer’s
mind—you have to look at the diagram in a certain way. Some
representations in this book are more abstract and require more
effortful thought. But I will argue that it’s worth learning to look in
the right way because doing so can reduce memory load and provide
a big payoff in insight.