The community has found out that such schemes may be well fitted to give the children a good time in school, but lead them to a bad time afterward. Life is hard work, and if they have never learned in school to give their concentrated attention to that which does not appeal to them and which does not interest them immediately, they have missed the most valuable lesson of their school years. The little practical information they could have learned at any time; the energy of attention and concentration can no longer be learned if the early years are wasted. However narrow and commercial the standpoint which is chosen may be, it can always be found that it is the general education which pays best, and the more the period of cultural work can be expanded the more efficient will be the services of the school for the practical services of the nation.[15]
Of course no one should construe these remarks as opposing in the slightest degree the laudable efforts that are constantly being put forth to make geometry more
interesting and to vitalize it by establishing as strong motives as possible for its study. Let the home, the workshop, physics, art, play,-all contribute their quota of motive to geometry as to all mathematics and all other branches. But let us never forget that geometry has a raison d'être beyond all this, and that these applications are sought primarily for the sake of geometry, and that geometry is not taught primarily for the sake of these applications.
When we consider how often geometry is attacked by those who profess to be its friends, and how teachers who have been trained in mathematics occasionally seem to make of the subject little besides a mongrel course in drawing and measuring, all the time insisting that they are progressive while the champions of real geometry are reactionary, it is well to read some of the opinions of the masters. The following quotations may be given occasionally in geometry classes as showing the esteem in which the subject has been held in various ages, and at any rate they should serve to inspire the teacher to greater love for his subject.
The enemies of geometry, those who know it only imperfectly, look upon the theoretical problems, which constitute the most difficult part of the subject, as mental games which consume time and energy that might better be employed in other ways. Such a belief is false, and it would block the progress of science if it were credible. But aside from the fact that the speculative problems, which at first sight seem barren, can often be applied to useful purposes, they always stand as among the best means to develop and to express all the forces of the human intelligence.-Abbé Bossut.
The sailor whom an exact observation of longitude saves from shipwreck owes his life to a theory developed two thousand years ago by men who had in mind merely the speculations of abstract geometry.-Condorcet.
If mathematical heights are hard to climb, the fundamental principles lie at every threshold, and this fact allows them to be comprehended by that common sense which Descartes declared was "apportioned equally among all men."-Collet.
It may seem strange that geometry is unable to define the terms which it uses most frequently, since it defines neither movement, nor number, nor space,--the three things with which it is chiefly concerned. But we shall not be surprised if we stop to consider that this admirable science concerns only the most simple things, and the very quality that renders these things worthy of study renders them incapable of being defined. Thus the very lack of definition is rather an evidence of perfection than a defect, since it comes not from the obscurity of the terms, but from the fact that they are so very well known.-Pascal.
God eternally geometrizes.-Plato.
God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.-Rabelais.
Without mathematics no one can fathom the depths of philosophy. Without philosophy no one can fathom the depths of mathematics. Without the two no one can fathom the depths of anything.-Bordas-Demoulin.
We may look upon geometry as a practical logic, for the truths which it studies, being the most simple and most clearly understood of all truths, are on this account the most susceptible of ready application in reasoning.-D'Alembert.
The advance and the perfecting of mathematics are closely joined to the prosperity of the nation.-Napoleon.
Hold nothing as certain save what can be demonstrated.-Newton.
To measure is to know.-Kepler.
The method of making no mistake is sought by every one. The logicians profess to show the way, but the geometers alone ever reach it, and aside from their science there is no genuine demonstration.-Pascal.
The taste for exactness, the impossibility of contenting one's self with vague notions or of leaning upon mere hypotheses, the necessity for perceiving clearly the connection between certain propositions and the object in view,-these are the most precious fruits of the study of mathematics.-Lacroix.
Bibliography. Smith, The Teaching of Elementary Mathematics, p. 234, New York, 1900; Henrici, Presidential Address before the British Association, Nature, Vol. XXVIII, p. 497; Hill, Educational Value of Mathematics, Educational Review, Vol. IX, p. 349; Young, The Teaching of Mathematics, p. 9, New York, 1907. The closing quotations are from Rebière, Mathématiques et Mathématiciens, Paris, 1893.
CHAPTER III
Table of Contents A BRIEF HISTORY OF GEOMETRY
The geometry of very ancient peoples was largely the mensuration of simple areas and solids, such as is taught to children in elementary arithmetic to-day. They early learned how to find the area of a rectangle, and in the oldest mathematical records that have come down to us there is some discussion of the area of triangles and the volume of solids.
The earliest documents that we have relating to geometry come to us from Babylon and Egypt. Those from Babylon are written on small clay tablets, some of them about the size of the hand, these tablets afterwards having been baked in the sun. They show that the Babylonians of that period knew something of land measures, and perhaps had advanced far enough to compute the area of a trapezoid. For the mensuration of the circle they later used, as did the early Hebrews, the value p = 3. A tablet in the British Museum shows that they also used such geometric forms as triangles and circular segments in astrology or as talismans.
The Egyptians must have had a fair knowledge of practical geometry long before the date of any mathematical treatise that has come down to us, for the building of the pyramids, between 3000 and 2400 B.C., required the application of several geometric principles. Some knowledge of surveying must also have been necessary to carry out the extensive plans for irrigation that were executed under Amenemhat III, about 2200 B.C.
The first definite knowledge that we have of Egyptian mathematics comes to us from a manuscript copied on papyrus, a kind of paper used about the Mediterranean in early times. This copy was made by one Aah-mesu (The Moon-born), commonly called Ahmes, who probably flourished about 1700 B.C. The original from which he copied, written about 2300 B.C., has been lost, but the papyrus of Ahmes, written nearly four thousand years ago, is still preserved, and is now in the British Museum. In this manuscript, which is devoted chiefly to fractions and to a crude algebra, is found some work on mensuration. Among the curious rules are the incorrect ones that the area of an isosceles triangle equals half the product of the base and one of the equal sides; and that the area of a trapezoid having bases b, b', and the nonparallel sides each equal to a, is ½a(b + b'). One noteworthy advance appears, however. Ahmes gives a rule for finding the area of a circle, substantially as follows: Multiply the square on the radius by (16/9)2, which is equivalent to taking for p the value 3.1605. This papyrus also contains some treatment of the mensuration of solids, particularly with reference to the capacity of granaries. There is also some slight mention of similar figures, and an extensive treatment of unit fractions,-fractions that were quite universal among the ancients. In the line of algebra it contains a brief treatment of the equation of the first degree with one unknown, and of progressions.[16]
Herodotus tells us that Sesostris, king of Egypt,[17] divided the land among his people and marked out the boundaries after the overflow of the Nile, so that surveying must have been well known in his day. Indeed, the harpedonaptæ, or rope stretchers, acquired their name because they stretched cords, in which were knots, so as to make the right triangle 3, 4, 5, when they wished to erect a perpendicular. This is a plan occasionally used by surveyors to-day, and it shows that the practical application of the Pythagorean Theorem was known long before Pythagoras gave what seems to have been the first general proof of the proposition.
From Egypt, and possibly from Babylon, geometry passed to the shores of Asia Minor and Greece. The scientific study of the subject...
