

Learning Geometry in Georgian England - tokenadult
http://mathdl.maa.org/mathDL/46/?pa=content&sa=viewDocument&nodeId=3930

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tokenadult
Tom Davis

<http://www.geometer.org/index.html>

of the mathematical circles in the Bay Area exposed me to a quotation about
learning mathematics: "Mathematics must be written into the mind, not read
into it. 'No head for mathematics' nearly always means 'Will not use a
pencil.'" Arthur Latham Baker, Elements of Solid Geometry (1894), page ix.

A series of FAQ files on mathematics learning for the Epsilon Camp summer
program

<http://www.epsiloncamp.org/FAQ.php>

expand on some of the same ideas.

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jmount
Amazing quote. Thank you.

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hdivider
Complain about the archaic teaching methods if you will, but having trawled
through substantially similar texts in the past (some writing styles truly
haven't changed in centuries), I'm quite sure that this stuff improves both
reading comprehension and spatial imagination.

To focus your mind on a small piece of symbolic or verbal-mathematical
information for a great length of time is difficult, but very rewarding. It's
something that we don't get very often in the modern world. Even in
programming (which is probably the fastest method of turning a mathematical
entity into something 'real') we often have to switch between countless
different tasks in order to solve just one nontrivial problem.

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Someone
_"some writing styles truly haven't changed in centuries"_

That is because this style dates back to Euclid's "Elements", a textbook used
for over four centuries.

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Evbn
Euclid didn't use elaborate penmanship:
<http://www.math.ubc.ca/~cass/Euclid/papyrus/papyrus.html>

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abecedarius
(That's from about 4 centuries after Euclid. It would _really help_ to have
manuscripts from Euclid's time -- for example, it's suspected others added the
definitions later and perhaps injected a neopythagorean POV not in the
original.)

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MaysonL
Never mind learning geometry: what was learning penmanship like?

