1.
Cuisenaire rod
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In the early 1950s, Caleb Gattegno popularised this set of coloured number rods created by the Belgian primary school teacher Georges Cuisenaire, who called the rods réglettes. They became very good at traditional arithmetic when they were allowed to manipulate the rods, in 1952 he published Les nombres en couleurs, Numbers in Color, which outlined their use. Cuisenaire, a player, taught music as well as arithmetic in the primary school in Thuin. He wondered why children found it easy and enjoyable to pick up a tune and these comparisons with music and its representation led Cuisenaire to experiment in 1931 with a set of ten rods sawn out of wood, with lengths from 1 cm to 10 cm. He painted each length of rod a different colour and began to use these in his teaching of arithmetic, at this sight, all other impressions of the surrounding vanished, to be replaced by a growing excitement. Gattegno named the rods Cuisenaire rods and began trialing and popularizing them, while of course the material has found an important place in myriad teacher-centered lessons, Gattegnos student-centered practice inspired a number of educators. For instance, the French-Canadian educator Madeleine Goutard in her 1963 Mathematics and Children, wrote and he is the one who reveals the child to himself by making him more conscious of, and more creative with his own mind. We find everything out for ourselves, Gattegno formed the Cuisenaire Company in Reading, England in 1954 and, by the end of the 1950s, Cuisenaire rods had been adopted by teachers in 10,000 schools in more than a hundred countries. The rods received wide use in the 1960s and 1970s, in 2000, the United States-based company Educational Teaching Aids acquired the US Cuisenaire Company and formed ETA/Cuisenaire to sell Cuisenaire rods-related material. In 2004, Cuisenaire rods were featured in an exhibition of paintings, though primarily used for mathematics, they have also become popular in language-teaching classrooms, particularly The Silent Way. In her first school, and in schools since then, Maria Montessori used coloured rods in the classroom to teach concepts of mathematics and length. This is possibly the first instance of coloured rods being used in the classroom for this purpose, catherine Stern also devised a set of coloured rods produced by staining wood with aesthetically pleasing colours. In 1961 Seton Pollock produced the Colour Factor system, consisting of rods from lengths 1 to 12 cm, based on the work of Cuisenaire and Gattegno, he had invented a unified system for logically assigning a color to any number. After white, the colors red, blue and yellow are assigned to the first three primes. Higher primes are associated with darkening shades of grey, the colors of non-prime numbers are obtained by mixing the colors associated with their factors – this is the key concept. The aesthetic and numerically comprehensive Color Factor system was marketed for years by Setons family, before being conveyed to Edward Arnold
2.
Number theory
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Number theory or, in older usage, arithmetic is a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to the study of the integers. It is sometimes called The Queen of Mathematics because of its place in the discipline. Number theorists study prime numbers as well as the properties of objects out of integers or defined as generalizations of the integers. Integers can be considered either in themselves or as solutions to equations, questions in number theory are often best understood through the study of analytical objects that encode properties of the integers, primes or other number-theoretic objects in some fashion. One may also study real numbers in relation to rational numbers, the older term for number theory is arithmetic. By the early century, it had been superseded by number theory. The use of the arithmetic for number theory regained some ground in the second half of the 20th century. In particular, arithmetical is preferred as an adjective to number-theoretic. The first historical find of a nature is a fragment of a table. The triples are too many and too large to have been obtained by brute force, the heading over the first column reads, The takiltum of the diagonal which has been subtracted such that the width. The tables layout suggests that it was constructed by means of what amounts, in language, to the identity 2 +1 =2. If some other method was used, the triples were first constructed and then reordered by c / a, presumably for use as a table. It is not known what these applications may have been, or whether there could have any, Babylonian astronomy, for example. It has been suggested instead that the table was a source of examples for school problems. While Babylonian number theory—or what survives of Babylonian mathematics that can be called thus—consists of this single, striking fragment, late Neoplatonic sources state that Pythagoras learned mathematics from the Babylonians. Much earlier sources state that Thales and Pythagoras traveled and studied in Egypt, Euclid IX 21—34 is very probably Pythagorean, it is very simple material, but it is all that is needed to prove that 2 is irrational. Pythagorean mystics gave great importance to the odd and the even, the discovery that 2 is irrational is credited to the early Pythagoreans. This forced a distinction between numbers, on the one hand, and lengths and proportions, on the other hand, the Pythagorean tradition spoke also of so-called polygonal or figurate numbers
3.
Natural number
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In mathematics, the natural numbers are those used for counting and ordering. In common language, words used for counting are cardinal numbers, texts that exclude zero from the natural numbers sometimes refer to the natural numbers together with zero as the whole numbers, but in other writings, that term is used instead for the integers. These chains of extensions make the natural numbers canonically embedded in the number systems. Properties of the numbers, such as divisibility and the distribution of prime numbers, are studied in number theory. Problems concerning counting and ordering, such as partitioning and enumerations, are studied in combinatorics, the most primitive method of representing a natural number is to put down a mark for each object. Later, a set of objects could be tested for equality, excess or shortage, by striking out a mark, the first major advance in abstraction was the use of numerals to represent numbers. This allowed systems to be developed for recording large numbers, the ancient Egyptians developed a powerful system of numerals with distinct hieroglyphs for 1,10, and all the powers of 10 up to over 1 million. A stone carving from Karnak, dating from around 1500 BC and now at the Louvre in Paris, depicts 276 as 2 hundreds,7 tens, and 6 ones, and similarly for the number 4,622. A much later advance was the development of the idea that 0 can be considered as a number, with its own numeral. The use of a 0 digit in place-value notation dates back as early as 700 BC by the Babylonians, the Olmec and Maya civilizations used 0 as a separate number as early as the 1st century BC, but this usage did not spread beyond Mesoamerica. The use of a numeral 0 in modern times originated with the Indian mathematician Brahmagupta in 628, the first systematic study of numbers as abstractions is usually credited to the Greek philosophers Pythagoras and Archimedes. Some Greek mathematicians treated the number 1 differently than larger numbers, independent studies also occurred at around the same time in India, China, and Mesoamerica. In 19th century Europe, there was mathematical and philosophical discussion about the nature of the natural numbers. A school of Naturalism stated that the numbers were a direct consequence of the human psyche. Henri Poincaré was one of its advocates, as was Leopold Kronecker who summarized God made the integers, in opposition to the Naturalists, the constructivists saw a need to improve the logical rigor in the foundations of mathematics. In the 1860s, Hermann Grassmann suggested a recursive definition for natural numbers thus stating they were not really natural, later, two classes of such formal definitions were constructed, later, they were shown to be equivalent in most practical applications. The second class of definitions was introduced by Giuseppe Peano and is now called Peano arithmetic and it is based on an axiomatization of the properties of ordinal numbers, each natural number has a successor and every non-zero natural number has a unique predecessor. Peano arithmetic is equiconsistent with several systems of set theory
4.
Divisor
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In mathematics, a divisor of an integer n, also called a factor of n, is an integer m that may be multiplied by some other integer to produce n. In this case one says also that n is a multiple of m, an integer n is divisible by another integer m if m is a divisor of n, this implies dividing n by m leaves no remainder. Under this definition, the statement m ∣0 holds for every m, as before, but with the additional constraint k ≠0. Under this definition, the statement m ∣0 does not hold for m ≠0, in the remainder of this article, which definition is applied is indicated where this is significant. Divisors can be negative as well as positive, although sometimes the term is restricted to positive divisors. For example, there are six divisors of 4, they are 1,2,4, −1, −2, and −4,1 and −1 divide every integer. Every integer is a divisor of itself, every integer is a divisor of 0. Integers divisible by 2 are called even, and numbers not divisible by 2 are called odd,1, −1, n and −n are known as the trivial divisors of n. A divisor of n that is not a divisor is known as a non-trivial divisor. A non-zero integer with at least one divisor is known as a composite number, while the units −1 and 1. There are divisibility rules which allow one to recognize certain divisors of a number from the numbers digits, the generalization can be said to be the concept of divisibility in any integral domain. 7 is a divisor of 42 because 7 ×6 =42 and it can also be said that 42 is divisible by 7,42 is a multiple of 7,7 divides 42, or 7 is a factor of 42. The non-trivial divisors of 6 are 2, −2,3, the positive divisors of 42 are 1,2,3,6,7,14,21,42. 5 ∣0, because 5 ×0 =0, if a ∣ b and b ∣ a, then a = b or a = − b. If a ∣ b and a ∣ c, then a ∣ holds, however, if a ∣ b and c ∣ b, then ∣ b does not always hold. If a ∣ b c, and gcd =1, then a ∣ c, if p is a prime number and p ∣ a b then p ∣ a or p ∣ b. A positive divisor of n which is different from n is called a proper divisor or a part of n. A number that does not evenly divide n but leaves a remainder is called an aliquant part of n, an integer n >1 whose only proper divisor is 1 is called a prime number
5.
Perfect number
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In number theory, a perfect number is a positive integer that is equal to the sum of its proper positive divisors, that is, the sum of its positive divisors excluding the number itself. Equivalently, a number is a number that is half the sum of all of its positive divisors i. e. σ1 = 2n. This definition is ancient, appearing as early as Euclids Elements where it is called τέλειος ἀριθμός. Euclid also proved a formation rule whereby q /2 is a perfect number whenever q is a prime of the form 2 p −1 for prime p —what is now called a Mersenne prime. Much later, Euler proved that all even numbers are of this form. This is known as the Euclid–Euler theorem and it is not known whether there are any odd perfect numbers, nor whether infinitely many perfect numbers exist. The first perfect number is 6 and its proper divisors are 1,2, and 3, and 1 +2 +3 =6. Equivalently, the number 6 is equal to half the sum of all its positive divisors, the next perfect number is 28 =1 +2 +4 +7 +14. This is followed by the perfect numbers 496 and 8128, in about 300 BC Euclid showed that if 2p−1 is prime then 2p−1 is perfect. The first four numbers were the only ones known to early Greek mathematics. Philo of Alexandria in his first-century book On the creation mentions perfect numbers, claiming that the world was created in 6 days and the moon orbits in 28 days because 6 and 28 are perfect. Philo is followed by Origen, and by Didymus the Blind, st Augustine defines perfect numbers in City of God in the early 5th century AD, repeating the claim that God created the world in 6 days because 6 is the smallest perfect number. The Egyptian mathematician Ismail ibn Fallūs mentioned the next three numbers and listed a few more which are now known to be incorrect. Euclid proved that 2p−1 is a perfect number whenever 2p −1 is prime. Prime numbers of the form 2p −1 are known as Mersenne primes, after the seventeenth-century monk Marin Mersenne, for 2p −1 to be prime, it is necessary that p itself be prime. However, not all numbers of the form 2p −1 with a prime p are prime, in fact, Mersenne primes are very rare—of the 9,592 prime numbers p less than 100,000, 2p −1 is prime for only 28 of them. Nicomachus conjectured that every number is of the form 2p−1 where 2p −1 is prime. Ibn al-Haytham circa 1000 AD conjectured that every perfect number is of that form
6.
6 (number)
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6 is the natural number following 5 and preceding 7. The SI prefix for 10006 is exa-, and for its reciprocal atto-,6 is the smallest positive integer which is neither a square number nor a prime number. Six is the second smallest composite number, its proper divisors are 1,2 and 3, since six equals the sum of its proper divisors, six is the smallest perfect number, Granville number, and S -perfect number. As a perfect number,6 is related to the Mersenne prime 3,6 is the only even perfect number that is not the sum of successive odd cubes. As a perfect number,6 is the root of the 6-aliquot tree, and is itself the sum of only one number. Six is the number that is both the sum and the product of three consecutive positive numbers. Unrelated to 6 being a number, a Golomb ruler of length 6 is a perfect ruler. Six is the first discrete biprime and the first member of the discrete biprime family, Six is the smallest natural number that can be written as the sum of two positive rational cubes which are not integers,6 =3 +3. Six is a perfect number, a harmonic divisor number and a superior highly composite number. The next superior highly composite number is 12,5 and 6 form a Ruth-Aaron pair under either definition. There are no Graeco-Latin squares with order 6, if n is a natural number that is not 2 or 6, then there is a Graeco-Latin square with order n. The smallest non-abelian group is the symmetric group S3 which has 3, s6, with 720 elements, is the only finite symmetric group which has an outer automorphism. This automorphism allows us to construct a number of mathematical objects such as the S Steiner system, the projective plane of order 4. This can also be expressed category theoretically, consider the category whose objects are the n element sets and this category has a non-trivial functor to itself only for n =6. 6 similar coins can be arranged around a central coin of the radius so that each coin makes contact with the central one. This makes 6 the answer to the kissing number problem. The densest sphere packing of the plane is obtained by extending this pattern to the lattice in which each circle touches just six others. 6 is the largest of the four all-Harshad numbers, a six-sided polygon is a hexagon, one of the three regular polygons capable of tiling the plane
7.
12 (number)
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12 is the natural number following 11 and preceding 13. The product of the first three factorials, twelve is a highly composite number, divisible by 2,3,4. It is central to systems of counting, including the Western calendar and units of time. The word twelve is the largest number with a name in English. Such uses gradually disappeared with the introduction of Arabic numerals during the 12th-century Renaissance and it derives from the Old English twelf and tuelf, first attested in the 10th-century Lindisfarne Gospels Book of John. It has cognates in every Germanic language, whose Proto-Germanic ancestor has been reconstructed as *twaliƀi, from *twa and suffix *-lif- or *-liƀ- of uncertain meaning. It is sometimes compared with the Lithuanian dvýlika, although -lika is used as the suffix for all numbers from 11 to 19, every other Indo-European language instead uses a form of two+ten, such as the Latin duōdecim. The usual ordinal form is twelfth but dozenth or duodecimal is also used in some contexts, similarly, a group of twelve things is usually a dozen but may also be referred to as a duodecad. The adjective referring to a group of twelve is duodecuple, as with eleven, the earliest forms of twelve are often considered to be connected with Proto-Germanic *liƀan or *liƀan, with the implicit meaning that two is left after having already counted to ten. The Lithuanian suffix is also considered to share a similar development, the suffix *-lif- has also been connected with reconstructions of the Proto-Germanic for ten. While, as mentioned above,12 has its own name in Germanic languages such as English and German, it is a number in many other languages, e. g. Italian dodici. In Germany, according to an old tradition, the numbers 0 through 12 were spelt out, the Duden now calls this tradition outdated and no longer valid, but many writers still follow it. Another system spells out all numbers written in one or two words, Twelve is a composite number, the smallest number with exactly six divisors, its divisors being 1,2,3,4,6 and 12. Twelve is also a composite number, the next one being twenty-four. Twelve is also a highly composite number, the next one being sixty. It is the first composite number of the form p2q, a square-prime,12 has an aliquot sum of 16. Accordingly,12 is the first abundant number and demonstrates an 8-member aliquot sequence,12 is the 3rd composite number in the 3-aliquot tree, the only number which has 12 as its aliquot sum is the square 121. Only 2 other square primes are abundant, Twelve is a sublime number, a number that has a perfect number of divisors, and the sum of its divisors is also a perfect number
8.
20 (number)
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20 is the natural number following 19 and preceding 21. A group of twenty units may also be referred to as a score,20 is a tetrahedral number as 1,4,10,20. 20 is the basis for vigesimal number systems,20 is the third composite number comprising the product of a squared prime and a prime, and also the second member of the q family in this form. 20 has a sum of 22. Accordingly,20 is the abundant number and demonstrates an 8-member aliquot sequence. 20 is the smallest primitive abundant number,20 is the 4th composite number in the 7-aliquot tree. Two numbers have 20 as their sum, the discrete semiprime 34. Only 2 other square primes are abundant 12 and 18,20 can be written as the sum of three Fibonacci numbers uniquely, i. e.20 =13 +5 +2. The product of the number of divisors and the number of divisors of 20 is exactly 20. 20 is the number of required to optimally solve a Rubiks Cube in the worst case. 20 is the number with more than one digit that can be written from base 2 to base 20 using only the digits 0 to 9. The third magic number in physics, the IAU shower number for Coma Berenicids. The number of amino acids that are encoded by the standard genetic code. In some countries, the number 20 is used as an index in measuring visual acuity, 20/20 indicates normal vision at 20 feet, although it is commonly used to mean perfect vision. When someone is able to see only after an event how things turned out, the Baltimore Orioles and Cincinnati Reds, both for Hall of Famer Frank Robinson. The Kansas City Royals, for Frank White, the Los Angeles Dodgers, for Hall of Famer Don Sutton. The Philadelphia Phillies, for Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt, the Pittsburgh Pirates, for Hall of Famer Pie Traynor. The St. Louis Cardinals, for Hall of Famer Lou Brock, the San Francisco Giants, for Hall of Famer Monte Irvin, who played for the team when it was the New York Giants
9.
24 (number)
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24 is the natural number following 23 and preceding 25. The SI prefix for 1024 is yotta, and for 10−24 yocto and these numbers are the largest and smallest number to receive an SI prefix to date. In a 24-hour clock, the hour is in conventional language called twelve or twelve oclock. 24 is the factorial of 4 and a number, being the first number of the form 23q. It follows that 24 is the number of ways to order 4 distinct items and it is the smallest number with exactly eight divisors,1,2,3,4,6,8,12, and 24. It is a composite number, having more divisors than any smaller number. 24 is a number, since adding up all the proper divisors of 24 except 4 and 8 gives 24. Subtracting 1 from any of its divisors yields a number,24 is the largest number with this property. 24 has a sum of 36 and the aliquot sequence. It is therefore the lowest abundant number whose aliquot sum is itself abundant, the aliquot sum of only one number,529 =232, is 24. There are 10 solutions to the equation φ =24, namely 35,39,45,52,56,70,72,78,84 and 90 and this is more than any integer below 24, making 24 a highly totient number. 24 is the sum of the prime twins 11 and 13, the product of any four consecutive numbers is divisible by 24. This is because among any four consecutive numbers there must be two numbers, one of which is a multiple of four, and there must be a multiple of three. The tesseract has 24 two-dimensional faces,24 is the only nontrivial solution to the cannonball problem, that is,12 +22 +32 + … +242 is a perfect square. In 24 dimensions there are 24 even positive definite unimodular lattices, the Leech lattice is closely related to the equally nice length-24 binary Golay code and the Steiner system S and the Mathieu group M24. The modular discriminant Δ is proportional to the 24th power of the Dedekind eta function η, Δ = 12η24, the Barnes-Wall lattice contains 24 lattices. 24 is the number whose divisors — namely 1,2,3,4,6,8,12,24 — are exactly those numbers n for which every invertible element of the commutative ring Z/nZ is a square root of 1. It follows that the multiplicative group × = is isomorphic to the additive group 3 and this fact plays a role in monstrous moonshine
