Jack Evans' Blog

       This blog will talk about both the modern and Mayan calendar and how our sense of time and place revolves around the idea of maths and relates to the topic of ethnomathematics. Professor Mgombelo sent us all a Mayan Calendar and it has been something we have referred to throughout the last couple of months in EDUC-4P75. The Mayan Calender to me is very compelling because I find it very interesting to see how ancient cultures studied, learned, and made sense of the world around them. This also relates to one of my past blogs that discussed the numerical system we use coming all the way from India. Something very fundamental to the maths we use that is not even taught to kids in school. Firstly, in regards to the Mayans pyramid, being built in 1050 the pyramid already tells us something about their knowledge of maths and their perception of the year.  The Mayans constructed the pyramids with 4 sides of stairs, they would construct 91 steps in total. If you ...

  Something we have been talking about a lot is the idea of math in everyday life and I thought it was interesting when we were looking at mathematics in games and leisure. What sparked my thinking was when I was watching the documentary with the ancient game in the Middle East. It was cool to see that this math game was so prominent it was woven into their way of life and culture. Going back dozens of generations into ancient culture. Going so far to have houses dedicated to this game. Math is a tool for cultural gatherings? I think where we this is in a western society would be using math to learn or to gamble. In many casinos people can count the cards and predict what card the dealer will flip next. The game I am going to explain thankfully does not involve taking my money. It is a whole 2 dollars at the dollar store. Way better then losing 25-dollar hands in Niagara. In a more leisure sense, math can be seen with card games such as “Euchre”. A popular card game that has the pl...

 I found it very interesting how the ancient people of India came to develop the numerical system we all know and love today. Over the week where we watched and studied how ancient people all discovered their kind of mathematics generally around the same time. My first teachable is history so I always wonder why something is the way it is and now I happily know where many ideas of mathematics come from! I generally found the whole history of mathematics interesting. The documentary allowed me to develop a different historical view on the times as opposed to what  I am used to studying. It is almost like I put "Math Lens" on to see how intertwined human history and maths are. We even unfortunately see this with the Chinese leader who used maths to determine when the best time to get an heir is. The funny thing is this makes perfect sense when you think about how important one's legacy was in the context of an ancient monarch/leader. It was cool to compare and contrast the ...