Perfect Numbers like Perfect Men are Very Rare

Hello Class!

Thank you for all of your insightful comments last week about how someone’s culture can impact the work that they do. We had such a great conversation about how everything going on in our lives impacts what we do at school everyday, how we perform in our sports and clubs, and even what we want to do after high school. Hopefully we can keep those things in mind as we continue through this class.

Now we have been using a lot of basic algebra in class recently as we factor expressions for various reasons. Many of the polynomials that we have factored so far have been quadratics. Have you ever wondered who decided we would write a little 2 in above, and slightly to the right of a number or variable to signify that we wanted to multiply it by itself twice? I would imagine that many of you never thought to questions why we write things that way. If your teacher told you thats how its done, then that’s all that matters right? Well, not anymore! This week we are going to talk some about how the mathematician we are studying impacted exponent notation. Before reading the rest of the blog post about Descartes, please answer the following “I Wonder” question in the comments below.

I Wonder

If we did not have the exponent notation () that we are used to today, how would you denote the following:

Create your own exponent notation for the expression and place it in the comments below. It MUST be different than the notation that is widely used today.

Before we discuss Descartes contributions to exponent notation, let's discuss other mathematicians that impacted this area of mathematics. There are records that trace the use of exponents all the way back to Euclid (our first mathematician that we studied in September). This shows that the idea of exponents was not new to math when Descartes started studying math. In fact, Nicolas Chuquet used a raised number to represent an exponent in the early 1500s. Several other mathematicians made contributions to the topic over the next 100 years until Descartes added to their work in 1637 by providing the notation of superscript that we are used to seeing today.

Your homework for class tomorrow is to answer the following question and provide two citations to support your claims. Be prepared to discuss your responses with the class.

1. In the blog post this week, I mentioned that several other mathematicians made contributions to the topic of exponents and their notation over a couple hundred year time period. Pick on mathematician that made a contribution to the topic and explain why you this that contribution was significant to how we use exponents today.

**You may not use Descartes or Chuquet because I already told you their
contributions.

Hay, K. (n.d.). History of Exponents. Retrieved February 26, 2018, from https://www.sutori.com/story/history-of-exponents