[lordnacho]

> Such problems may seem trivial to someone trained in modern elementary-school algebra

I've often wondered about how school curricula evolve over time. Presumably people were doing _something_ in 13th century math classes? What were they doing? How soon did we end up incorporating modern number representation into elementary school?

Something like calculus was cutting edge when Newton and Leibnitz were around, now it's what people learn in high school.

Are there things that we currently consider to be new and exciting that in a few years will be taught to every student? What will drop out?

[srean]

> Presumably people were doing _something_ in 13th century math classes? What were they doing?

Glad you asked. This is what one such endearing 13th century kid was doing in class

https://resobscura.substack.com/p/onfims-world-medieval-chil...

[ozyschmozy]

Thanks for posting this, it's a run read and the pictures are amazing/hilarious. The faces on the first picture are so funny and expressive

[srean]

I wonder if it's his Maths teacher that Onfim is killing while sar on a horse.

[analog31]

Perhaps related, I've read that Al-Khwarizmi's book on algebra [0] contained no equations or even any numerals. It was apparently a wall of text.

My take is that you pretty much had to be a philosopher to make your way through a text like that. Al-Khwarizmi wrote down a general solution to the quadratic equation, which had eluded humanity since the ancient Greeks. Today, the solution and its proof are taught to schoolchildren.

One thing that's happened is that notation has been improved. For instance we now have equations and we use numerals to write numbers.

Similar deal with Newton and Leibnitz. The notation that we use for teaching calculus resembles theirs but has been improved. Perhaps moreso for Newton's mechanics. Philosophers debated about Newton, now we teach his ideas to schoolchildren.

Likewise Clerk Maxwell. What I've read is that his theory was also unreadable by most of us, but his successor, Heaviside, came up with the notation that we teach to slightly older schoolchildren.

This seems to be a recurring story. Maybe someday there will be a notation that makes string theory seem obvious... to schoolchildren. ;-)

[0] The origin of both words "algorithm" and "algebra"

[srean]

> I've read that Al-Khwarizmi's book on algebra [0] contained no equations or even any numerals

Yes the use of symbols came much later. Algebra used to be couched in terms of do this to that quantity while maintaining that relation between that and that quantity then to the quantity obtained in that step ....

[jjtheblunt]

> Something like calculus was cutting edge when Newton and Leibnitz were around, now it's what people learn in high school.

To your point, I had lots of such in (American public) high school in Chicago suburbia, but now decades later it seems a small fraction of Americans ever took calculus. I find that sad, since I thought it kinda beautiful work.