Why teach Math History?

Prior to reading the article: I honestly do not see the importance of teaching math history before college/university. As a math major, we covered some math history and talked about various mathematicians and the theorems they proved/discovered, but I personally was not introduced to math history at the secondary level. In addition, I do not yet see the relevance of math history at the secondary level, especially with classes like Pre-Calculus and Calculus solely being based on algebra and graphing. That being said, I am looking forward to what the article has to say about why math history is important.

The article mentioned that math history spurs creativity and encourages students to come up with their own questions. In university, I can agree that learning math history and how certain theorems are proven develops better problem solving skills and creativity. I also can see how learning math history in high school can be engaging and can stir up interest. When I learned math history in university, I would come up with ideas and follow up questions for further theorems (that may or may not already be solved). However, my concern with math history at the high school level is that there is not sufficient time in the curriculum (this is from my experience). In addition, I felt like it deviates from the more important content that students need to focus on to prepare for university (i.e. algebra, graphing, functions).

Looking into the authors' thoughts on how math can be integrated into the classroom, I believe that I may have subtly incorporated a little bit of mathematics history at the secondary level, but just not a lot. For the most part, math history was only explicitly discussed with the students who were interested and sought a deeper understanding of math (for example, I showed Monty Hall Problem to a student who indirectly asked about conditional probability). These were mostly the students participating in the CEMC Waterloo math competition. But for the most part, the math history I incorporated in the classroom were the brief snippets of historical information in the textbook that served as "motivations" for the students to ponder on (intrinsic nature of math activity).

All in all, I cannot really say that this article has changed my perspective of math history's irrelavance in the classroom at the secondary level. The authors made some good points, but apart from spurring interest in the brighter students, the authors' points seemed more relevant for students doing math at the post-secondary level. For example, I taught the quadratic formula in my Pre-Calculus 11 class. Later on, we went on to factor easy cubics and quartics with the factoring by grouping method. One of my students asked me if there is a closed form for cubics and quartics. I briefly explained that there is for both, but there is none for quintics. I googled the closed forms of the formulas for him, and told him that he will learn more about it in university if he ever decides to take a course called Galois Theory. I guess me explaining it to him may have spurred some additional interest in the subject, but my point is that I couldn't go into detail nor answer his question based what was learned at the secondary level.