Math Mystery

Math­e­mat­ics is a mys­tery. It’s almost as mys­te­ri­ous as the ori­gin of May day. The pat­terns, sto­ries, chal­lenges, and games that have come from man’s study of math­e­mat­ics are end­less. Man has been dis­cov­er­ing and adapt­ing the math­e­mat­i­cal lan­guage for over 2000 years, and we are not any clos­er to ful­ly com­pre­hend­ing every­thing in this world than we were with Pythago­ras. This is the real­i­ty of the abstract con­cept of infin­i­ty. Can any­one tru­ly grasp how great it is that we can even try to under­stand some of God’s cre­ation through a math­e­mat­i­cal language? 

I under­stand that most high school stu­dents must com­plete a cer­tain amount of math in order to pro­ceed onto col­lege, how­ev­er, ele­men­tary stu­dents have more than enough time to dis­cov­er the joys, won­ders, and mys­ter­ies in the world of math­e­mat­ics. Here are a few ways you can get your stu­dent started: 

1. Solve rid­dles — buy a rid­dle book, write a rid­dle on a white board in your home or send it via text to your old­er chil­dren each week. 
2. Read sto­ries — there is no legit­i­mate rea­son for a mod­ern math stu­dent to ignore the great sto­ries of Archimedes, Pythago­ras, Pas­cal, and Gauss. These men did­n’t live in a box, they lived in a real world and con­sid­ered dis­cov­er­ing math­e­mat­i­cal truths to be new cut­ting edge infor­ma­tion — because it was. 
3. Play games — see how many there are! Prac­ti­cal­ly every board game uses log­ic skills, while card games work with numbers. 
4. Copy exper­i­ments — it’s true that a lot of math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­las are pen to paper work, but there’s also a lot of math­e­mat­i­cal con­cepts that are hands on. Learn how Eras­tothenes cal­cu­lat­ed the height of the pyra­mids and use that pro­ce­dure to cal­cu­late the height of the tree in your yard. Check out the appli­ca­tion of the laws of motion the New­ton dis­cov­ered. Math is infi­nite, so aren’t the possibilities!
5. Check your atti­tude — I hate to say it, but the rea­son that a lot of chil­dren hate math is because their par­ents have bad mem­o­ries and cast those feel­ings on their kids. This isn’t fair to you, your kids, or the world of math­e­mat­ics. It also isn’t healthy. Check your­self. What can you do to be open to the won­der­ful mys­te­ri­ous world of mathematics. 

There’s a very real chance that you have nev­er explored the mys­tery of math­e­mat­ics. The blood of the mur­ders that were com­mit­ted to hide the truth, the over­whelm that comes from con­tem­plat­ing infin­i­ty, or the mon­ey that was spent to keep cer­tain math facts a secret are gen­er­al­ly unknown to the major­i­ty of math stu­dents today. Why do we sac­ri­fice the joy of dis­cov­ery in the name of efficiency?