Reflection
“The mathematician does not study pure mathematics because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it and he delights in it because it is beautiful.” J. H. Poincare (1854-1912), (cited in H.E. Huntley, The Divine Proportion, Dover, 1970)
I think it takes a certain person to overlook the usefulness of an equation or math problem and look at its true beauty and its potential of beauty to the world.
When Cathy exclaims “Math is beautiful” I usually don’t understand because I am still trying figure out how math even works. So for most of the time I don’t really understand what she means. But in the beginning of the year we made a lot of drawings using compasses and that is when I saw math to be beautiful. It was beautiful because you could create so many different designs while having each one be unique with just using one simple math tool. So when Cathy says “Math is beautiful”, I believe that can be true. I just sometimes miss the beauty in it.
One topic that I enjoyed learning about this semester was Triangle Conjectures. I enjoyed learning about this subject because I understood most of it and it involved some simple algebraic equations, which I enjoy because I like algebra. During this unit we learned how to find a missing angle by adding x (the missing angle) to one side of the interior angle and setting it equal to the measure of the exterior angle. This came easily to me because I did Algebra 2 last year so I enjoyed doing the simple equations to find the missing angle.
Through this semester, we did multiple Problems of the Week (POWs). One POW that I found to be challenging was Luther’s proof. In this POW we had to prove that triangles always add up to 180° but without making a mark on the triangle. This was very challenging for me because I am a visual learner so it was hard to think of the triangle in my head and we were also not really learning about this in class so it was hard for me to think of a solution to the problem. One technique I used to solve this was to walk around a triangle that Cathy drew on the floor. This way I could visualize it and “mark” what I needed to without drawing on my paper and prove that all triangles add up to 180°.
