"Lecture" for Week 6

Sorry this is so late. I was working on it Sunday evening when the power went out in College Station for 2.5 hours.

The chapters on Islamic and Medieval mathematics are quite short, and I think the problems I've assigned for next Monday (Oct. 13) will be quick. Then you have a book review due the next Friday (Oct. 17), and the next homework will be due the following Thursday (Oct. 23).

Perhaps I haven't left enough time for reading Wolfram's lecture on the history of notation this week. It looks interesting, but I haven't had time for it myself. In any case, it is not specifically medieval, so try to work it in later if not now.

Several of you have remarked that we're moving through history awfully fast for comfort. With 14 weeks in a semester and 6000 years of history, we need to average 429 years per week, and this week is one of the gallops. At the end of this week we'll be at 1400 CE, so we can slow down to 75 years a week from then on.

This week's reading, especially the Islamic part, is full of unfamiliar and complicated names. It's good we don't have a final exam, right? I feel I ought to be providing some guidance as to which are the most important figures. My list is

I have to admit that the main criterion for getting on this list is that I had heard of the person before doing the reading. Perhaps the most striking or inspiring thing about these periods is that some individuals did do significant mathematics in such isolation, in societies that were not conducive to it.

If you want to know more about Fibonacci numbers, there are THREE articles about them in the June 2003 Mathematics Magazine. The main point of two of them is that many properties sometimes said to be amazing special properties of Fibinacci numbers can be generalized to any sequence defined by a similar recursion relation.

I hope to add some remarks on the Early Greek homework here before the end of the week.