Below you will find the preliminary plan for what we will work on in our fourteen classes.
In the column Reading, you find three pieces of information:
Texts that we are going to talk about in class. It is a good idea to take a look at these texts before the class even if we will have some time during the class to read them.
Background literature on what we talk about in class. This is primarily meant for review after class.
Slides used in class. Observe that these will not be complete in any sense and it won't be possible to review a missed class by only looking at the slides.
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Date
Meta-content
Content
Reading
Events
1
Tu 30/8
Format and overview of the course requirements and assessment
Prehistoric mathematics (Babylon and Egypt). Numbers and counting; zero; positional systems. Scribes and mathematical training.
How to write an essay: content, structure, argumentation, etc.; grading criteria
Ancient Greek mathematics. Reception of Babylonian & Egyptian mathematics. Where this knowledge came from & what it was used for. Scholarship in Greece and the culture of commentaries. Proofs, definitions, and axioms. Euclid's elements.
Katz, Ch. 2-6 (read excerpts), in particular Ch. 3 Stedall, Ch. I.2-3 Fauvel-Gray, Ch. 3.A, 3.B. An online, browsable version of Euclid's ElementsLinks to an external site. by David Joyce
Katz, Ch. 2.3, 21.3 William Ewald, From Kant to Hilbert: A Source Book in the Foundations of Mathematics, Vol. II, 1996. Ch. 24 (David Hilbert), 25 (L.E.J. Brouwer)
Stedall, Ch. 7 Katz, Ch. 14.3, 18 N. L. Rabinovitch, Probability and Statistical Inference in Ancient and Medieval Jewish Literature, University of Toronto Press, 1973 G. Reith, The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western Culture, Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought, 1999