Hey Blog! This week my lessons have been a bit more focused on maths than usual, so I’m going to write about maths today.
I learn maths with an excellent program called “White Rose Maths”, a website-based maths learning site. The lessons are structured with a short video at the start, a printable/displayable worksheet to practice on and other small questions like “True or false” – I’m fairly sure you can guess what happens in that!
We see maths in almost everything. It’s one of the very top subjects learned in education. But are we responsible for this, or is nature? Did humans invent maths?
Maths generally consists of numbers, and we have styled and named them. However numbers can be represented in many forms, such as physical objects, counters, tallies, spots… pretty much anything. This means numbers, a basic principal of maths, are actually really old, far older than humans. Other species can do maths as well. Some domestic, like cows, who can tell the time (we have tamed cows and therefore they run by our time) for when it is feeding time and when to milk them. Some ants, wild creatures, can estimate the area of a shape, and use patterns to find the optimal path; other ants can use the basic rules of addition to count their steps to calculate distance. Forewarning to anyone trying to train an ant to do your maths homework – they won’t understand multiplication, division, or algebra… which is the next thing.
Take Einstein’s equation E=mc2 (Energy = mass x speed of light squared) for example. This is algebra – a form of maths – and the equation is as old as matter, as all matter has mass, and matter was first created at the beginning of the universe, 4 billion years ago, a LONG time before humans.
To answer my question, no, I don’t think humans invented maths, I think it was first created at the beginning of time, the beginning of the universe. However, we have discovered and defined it to suit our needs, one of which being… Making bunting for my shed! Inspired by the latest series of the Great British Sewing Bee (series 8, which started this week) I decided to make some bunting to decorate the front of the Home Ed Shed. We went to the fabric shop and got a few pieces, and I have now calculated the width of my shed, and made a design to show how my bunting is supposed to look. Here is the blueprint (even though it isn’t really blue!):
I’m going to start sewing this weekend, so look out another week for a new photo of my shed, complete with bunting.