Wednesday, December 13, 2023

Assignment 3 and Course Reflection

The project on Tower of Hanoi was interesting since I was able to learn why the puzzle was named that way and the stories that revolved around it. I was surprised that the puzzle was only created a couple of centuries ago by Lucas in the 1800s, but nonetheless it fascinating to see what influenced the nature of the alternate names to this puzzle. I was fortunate to take a class on combinatorics and went over this puzzle in the recursion unit. It looks tricky to solve at first, but once what is behind the scenes is understood, it won't be as mindless/tricky to solve. I may use this as a fun project in the geometric series topic. First introduce it, talk about the steps behind on how to solve it and later deduce the closed form formula, which is a geometric sum. 

With respect to the course I really liked learning about the ancient Babylonian sexagesimal based 60 arithmetic. Playing around with fractions on the boards in the orchard garden were fun times. To understand different number bases is important, like binary in computing. There is also good reasons why 60 is a nice base number to work with. Getting in touch with the mathematical findings and work during the Islamic golden age was curious too. My least memorable moment is probably focusing too much on ancient Babylonian math, as most of the blog posts were on it. I think some suggestions is to do more hands on work and solving more problems for the future.

Assignment 3 and Course Reflection

The project on Tower of Hanoi was interesting since I was able to learn why the puzzle was named that way and the stories that revolved arou...