2009年4月19日 星期日

My idea on environmental friendly Mathematics

That is actually nothing new, using examples from environmental issue like pollution, growth of population, depletion of Ozone in Mathematics textbook is already an adopted idea. My thought is related to a more fundamental change in the syllabus of Mathematics: It was suggested human mind has difficulty to contemplate exponential growth, which maybe a root cause for the lack of awareness of the issue of population explosion. So my suggestion is instead of memorize the multiplication table of from 1*1 to 10*10, student should learn to memorize the index table from 1^1 to 10^10 (For all the result within 5 digits in Primary School, and 10 digits when graduate from Secondary School). In this way, student would built a sense of how growth of population affect the Earth from Primary school; moreover, what we master when we memorize the multiplication table is essentially doing the arithmetic operation of addition in our head, but not doing multiplication . Who can push it to the syllabus around the world?

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