A scalene triangle has no equal sides
Dec. 18th, 2006 11:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
todayiamadaisyFor the fifty-one weeks of the year in which I have no need of them, my little Christmas tree and box of decorations live in the rarely used and difficult to access storage space at the very top of my wardrobe. This space is shared with a pile of old university text books: such exciting titles as An Introduction to Econometrics, Theories in Management Accounting and Australia: A Concise Political and Social History. Oh, page turners, every last one.
Yesterday I decided it was about time to get the tree out for the year and while standing up the ladder to do so, I was distracted by something I noticed amongst those books: for some reason, I still have my Year 7 maths text book too (imaginatively named Maths 7 - see if you can guess what the Year 8 one was called). So I brought it down along with the tree, to flip through and make myself feel superior. How much more I know now - take that, young me! And so it proved to be.
Several things stood out:
1. How much of our youth is spent contemplating triangles, and how little we do it otherwise. Go on, consider the triangle now: the area of a triangle is half base times height. When was the last time you thought of that?
2. How very much I enjoy the word "isosceles".
3. How difficult it is to convey clearly the concept of "carrying the one" in addition and so on. I learnt that in primary school and it's second nature to me now, yet I found the explanation in the revision chapter at the start of the book utterly baffling. Kudos to the teachers of the world for their fine work explaining it.
4. How sets were obviously not on the Australian curriculum at the time, because in both primary and secondary school we always had to skip over that chapter. I have consequently reached adulthood - and successfully undertaken several university-level maths subjects - with only the barest knowledge of what Venn diagrams are all about. My holidays start next week; perhaps I should use the time to read chapter 3 more closely.
Then again, perhaps not. I've got this far without them.
Yesterday I decided it was about time to get the tree out for the year and while standing up the ladder to do so, I was distracted by something I noticed amongst those books: for some reason, I still have my Year 7 maths text book too (imaginatively named Maths 7 - see if you can guess what the Year 8 one was called). So I brought it down along with the tree, to flip through and make myself feel superior. How much more I know now - take that, young me! And so it proved to be.
Several things stood out:
1. How much of our youth is spent contemplating triangles, and how little we do it otherwise. Go on, consider the triangle now: the area of a triangle is half base times height. When was the last time you thought of that?
2. How very much I enjoy the word "isosceles".
3. How difficult it is to convey clearly the concept of "carrying the one" in addition and so on. I learnt that in primary school and it's second nature to me now, yet I found the explanation in the revision chapter at the start of the book utterly baffling. Kudos to the teachers of the world for their fine work explaining it.
4. How sets were obviously not on the Australian curriculum at the time, because in both primary and secondary school we always had to skip over that chapter. I have consequently reached adulthood - and successfully undertaken several university-level maths subjects - with only the barest knowledge of what Venn diagrams are all about. My holidays start next week; perhaps I should use the time to read chapter 3 more closely.
Then again, perhaps not. I've got this far without them.
