The House of Wisdom is the first point that made me stop. While I was doing my presentation on historical integration, I came across Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham) who lived over a thousand years ago. He had major contributions to optics and integration and was involved with the House of Wisdom. Initially I thought it was a group of collective individuals coming together to work on..discovering new things, though in fact it was primarily a library and a place for translation and research. The people in there would study ancient Greek mathematics/astronomy and further built on these topics. The one who established the House of Wisdom was Caliph alRashid. His son, Caliph al-Ma’mun, was the ruler who made the House of Wisdom so important. This caught my eye since the word "caliphate" means "an Islamic state, especially one ruled by a single religious and political leader". This word might've came from the two prominent aforementioned father/son. It also referred to the Islamic world during the medieval period, when Europe was in its dark ages while science and technology grew in the middle east. Furthermore it was interesting to how algebra and geometry flourished during the Islamic world which resulted in beautiful artwork captivating the eyes. A lot of the constructions with shapes inscribed within each other were mystifying too. Some circle geometry were shown as well with procedures I have never encountered in an elementary Euclidean geometry class. The good news is that many of these constructions can be replicated by hand with easy to follow instructions. This makes it friendly for school students to use so that they can create fascinating math works.
Hi Michael, really nice reflection, here. I was also struck by the fact that Europe's medieval period was the Islamic world's golden age. Your last point about constructions makes me wonder if there could be an activity that intersected between hand constructions and constructions with technological tools.
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