I Think, Therefore I Am

Hello Class!

Before you come to class tomorrow I would like you to solve the story problem below. Don’t worry too much! The story problem is one that you probably learned how to solve in middle school. Instead of focusing on the computations, I would like you to answer the two “I Wonder” questions that follow by commenting on the blog and then read some more about our mathematician of the month: Rene Descartes.

Let’s Take a Field Trip

331 students went on a field trip. Six buses were filled and seven students traveled in cars. How many students were on each bus?
I Wonder?
1. Were you able to do this question in your head or did you set up some sort of an equation?
2. Even if you did not set up an equation, list all of the components that would be included in one to represent this problem (i.e. what number, operations, etc).

“I think, therefore I am”

I am sure that many of you listed a variable as a component that should be included in the equation representing the “Let’s Take a Field Trip” story problem above. Have you ever thought about where this idea to use a letter to represent an unknown value came from? While your middle school teachers are brilliant people, they are not the ones who invented this idea! In fact, our mathematician that we are studying this month was one of the main influences in impacting how we use variables today.

Before we dive too deep into all of the great things that Rene Descartes discovered in mathematics, let’s make sure we know a little bit about where he came from. Descartes was born on March 31st, 1596 in La Hayne en Touraine, France. (That was four hundred and twenty-two years ago and over four thousand miles away!!) Some reports indicate that Decartes’ mother died in a complicated childbirth and others state that she had passed away by the time he was one. Without a mother to raise him, and a father that was a council member in the parliament, Rene found himself being cared for by his maternal grandmother (the grandma on his mom’s side of the family). Despite his unconventional upbringing, Decartes’s father valued a good education and paid for him to attend boarding school at Jesuit College of Henri the IV in La Fleche.

While in school, Descartes was a model student. Despite health complications that he faced due to his complicated childbirth, he was able to attend classes in the afternoon while spending his mornings in bed studying. He studied music, math, metaphysics, philosophy, and ethics during his time at Jesuit College. After completing boarding school (what would be the equivalent of you graduating high school) he was then accepted to a four year college where he studied law. Can you believe that somehow out of learning all of those different subjects he was able to come up with the idea of variables? I wonder which class he took in high school helped him with that!

As many of you can probably guess, in the years after Descartes graduated from college he went on to discover a multitude of things in math and in other fields. One of Descartes accomplishments was publishing the book Discourse de la methode ("Discourse on Method), in which he used variables for the first time. Throughout the rest of the month we will take a closer look at how his contributions affect the math we do in class and at what the world looked like when Descartes was alive. For class tomorrow please be prepared to talk about these two questions before we get started:

1. What part of Descartes story did you find relatable to your own life? (You are encouraged to research him some more if you don’t think your life is anything like his!)
2. What do you think led to Decartes idea of using variables to represent unknown values when solving problems?

Resources:

7TH CENTURY MATHEMATICS - DESCARTES. (2010). Retrieved February 14, 2018, from http://www.storyofmathematics.com/17th_descartes.html

René Descartes Biography. (2016, December 23). Retrieved February 14, 2018, from https://www.biography.com/people/ren-descartes-37613#later-life-death-and-legacy