The ancient Babylonians were an amazing people who had many extraordinary achievements. Among those is a mathematical formula that I believe most of us still remember from eighth grade, and that formula was originally a solution to paying tax.
The particular problem for the ordinary working Babylonian was this: Given a tax bill that has to be paid in crops, by how much should I increase the size of my field to pay it?
This problem can be written down as a quadratic equation of the form Ax2+Bx+C=0. And it is solved with this formula [see photo above]:
Are your middle school memories returning?
Over four millennia later, millions of people across the planet still remember this formula thanks to the modern way mathematics is taught.
But far fewer people can derive this expression. That’s also due to the way mathematics is taught—the usual derivation relies on a mathematical trick, called “completing the square,” that is far from intuitive. Indeed, after the Babylonians, it took mathematicians many centuries to stumble across this proof.
[...]
Enter Po-Shen Loh, a mathematician at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who has found a simpler way—one that appears to have gone unnoticed these 4,000 years.
Check out the full article over at Technology Review.
(Image Credit: Technology Review)
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It's a worthwhile alternative approach to deepen the understanding of the quadratic equation. Easier? It depends on the teacher and on the student!
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