I have already written about this year’s Abel Prize winner, Mikhail Gromov in earlier posts, but an article by Marcus du Sautoy in Times Online motivated an addition to the earlier posts. The article is called “Sexy maths: Drawing parallels in geometry”. In this article, du Sautoy claims that Gromov has made

(…) some of the most revolutionary contributtions to geometry since those of Euclid.

The article gives an interesting insight into some of the most important aspects of the historical development of geometry, with Euclid’s parallel postulate as a pivotal point. An excellent article by du Sautoy, who is a mathematician himself.

I am not going to quote anything from his post, only recommend it as an excellent read for the holidays!

Mojeed K. Akinsola and Adeneye O.A. Awofala have written an article about the Effect of personalization of instruction on students’ achievement and self-efficacy in mathematics word problems. This article was published in the last issue of International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology. Here is their abstract:

This study investigated the effect of personalized print-based instruction on the achievement and self-efficacy regarding mathematics word problems of 320 senior secondary students in Nigeria. The moderator effect of gender was also examined on independent variable (personalization) and dependent variables (mathematics word problem achievement and self-efficacy). The t-test statistic was used to analyse the data collected for the study. The results showed that significant differences existed in the mathematics word problem achievement and self-efficacy beliefs of personalized and non-personalized groups, male and female personalized groups and male and female non-personalized groups.

A few days ago, I wrote about the winner of this year’s Abel Prize: Mikail Gromov. Since then, a couple of other posts or articles have been published about this. The Chronicle of Higher Education published a small article about it. Today, a very interesting article was posted by someone who would be able to understand Gromov’s achievements better than most of us: Terence Tao. Professor Tao points to earlier articles he has written about Gromov’s theories, and he presents one of Gromov’s results along with a sketch of the original proof. So, if your mathematical skills are somewhat above average, you might be interested in taking a closer look at this 🙂

Russian mathematician Mikhail Gromov has been awarded the 2009 Abel Prize. The announcement of the first Abel Prize was made in 2002, in connection with the 200th anniversary of Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel‘s birth. Although the prize has a fairly recent history, it is already called “The Mathematicians’ Nobel“. The idea of having an annual mathematics prize like this was proposed as early as in 1899 by Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie, when it was made clear that there would be no Nobel prize in mathematics. These early attempts ended for several reasons, amongst others because Sophus Lie himself died in this same year (1899), and the dissolution of the union between Sweden and Norway in 1905 also made it difficult to create such a prize.

Mikhail Gromov (born 1943) was announced as this year’s winner today, by the President of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, Øyvind Østerud. Gromov will receive the prize from His Majesty King Harald in a ceremony in Oslo, May 19. The prize carries a cash award of NOK 6,000,000 (about USD 950,000). Gromov was given the prize because of his revolutionary contributions to the field of geometry.

My guess is by the way, that the rather small Wikipedia article about Gromov will increase in the next couple of days 🙂

Sources:
http://www.abelprisen.no/en/‘
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Gromov
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abel_prize

Yesterday, president Obama held a speech relating to education. The speech also mentioned math education a couple of times. Michael Alison Chandler gives a nice overview of this in an interesting blog post over at The Washington Post.

Adnan Baki and Bulent Guven have written an article about the interesting link between Persian mathematician, philosopher, astronomer and poet Omar Khayyam (1048-1122) and the dynamic geometry application Cabri. The article was recently published in Teaching Mathematics and its Applications, and it is entitled Khayyam with Cabri: experiences of pre-service mathematics teachers with Khayyam’s solution of cubic equations in dynamic geometry environment. Here is the abstract of their article:

The study reported in this article deals with the observed actions of Turkish pre-service mathematics teachers in dynamic geometry environment (DGE) as they were learning Khayyam’s method for solving cubic equations formed as x³ + ax = b. Having learned the method, modelled it in DGE and verified the correctness of the solution, students generated their own methods for solving different types of cubic equations such as x³ + ax² = b and x³ + a = bx in the light of Khayyam’s method. With the presented teaching experiment, students realized that Khayyam’s mathematics is different from theirs. We consider that this gave them an opportunity to have an insight about the cultural and social aspects of mathematics. In addition, the teaching experiment showed that dynamic geometry software is an excellent tool for doing mathematics because of their dynamic nature and accurate constructions. And, it can be easily concluded that the history of mathematics is useful resource for enriching mathematics learning environment.