Math 1510 Post #1

Ahh!  Now that I'm caught up, I'm feeling very confident with the content of our class thus far.  It seems like it was so long ago that I studied sets and properties.  Although some things were very familiar to me, the fog was pretty think over some of the concepts.  I don't think I ever encountered expressing numerals with different bases, Mayan or Babylonian symbols.  I was confused at first, but I was able to understand it after working through a feel problems. 

Upon becoming angry confused, I began thinking, "This is stupid, I'll never use this...Why do I even need to know this."  This sounded all to familiar to me.  This is how I have always seen math.  I've always hated disliked math as a whole.  Every semester, I would erase what I had learned as I didn't feel any of the things I was learning would be relevant to my life.  Surely, this was before I decided to pursue a career in education.  I have really been kicking myself for not trying to retain a bit more information. 

Anyway, onto the actual meat and potatoes! The first two weeks gave me good refreshers of some basic math.  I was able to get back into the groove and even bought a calculator.  I was able to brush up on things such as intersections and unions as well as the properties of addition and multiplication.  I encountered base ten representation and was able to work through the formulas with the help of our wonderful MyMathLab.  I'm not sure where I would be without the "Help Me Solve This" button.  It's my lifeline!

Mainly, the most interesting concept from the past two weeks has been the Mayan and Babylonian number systems.  These were literally foreign languages to me.  Here is a Simple Mayan Explanation to explain this new concept.  Here is another link to Different Number Systems that explains the Babylonian, Egyptian, and Mayan number systems.  It also explains a bit about the history of numbers.

It's always nice to have sites like these that explain the concepts a bit further.  Sometimes textbooks are a bit unclear on concepts that only appear in the book once.  Students often benefit from having more pictures and less text to explain new concepts.

I won't get into the explanation of the Mayan number system.  If you are interested, use my links.  The image above also explains the formula that is used to read the symbols used to illustrate large numbers.  Once I practiced a couple, it was super easy!