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Unique Math
Book Reviewed by Amazon.com, Who is Fourier?
A Mathematics Adventure, the English translation of the innovative
user- friendly math book written by Mr. Yo Sakakibara's students in
Japan, was recently reviewed by Amazon.com, an internet bookstore that
claims to carry 2.5 million titles. A copy of the review appears below.
To see the review for yourself (it may be up for a limited period of
time), or to order to copy of Who is Fourier? or What is Quantum
Mechanics? A Physics Adventure, the second book in the series, visit
Amazon's Eclectica web page at http://www.Amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/features/eclectica.html. by Jonathan
Kochmer I suspect mathematical and scientific education of the more motivated students in the United States would make great leaps forward if educators adopted the remarkable approach illustrated by Who Is Fourier? (Language Research Foundation). A group of mostly mathematically naive students started with a simple question "Why do people's voices sound different?" and answered this question by teaching themselves trigonometry, exponentiation, differentiation, integration, and Fourier Analysis (the method used to decompose complex waves into their simple component waves). At the end of this collective effort, the students wrote a book that John Allen Paulos (author of bestselling A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper) calls "an approach...that is innovative, conceptual, and appealingly informal." Who Is Fourier? is a terrific example of the potential of the constructivist philosophy of education related to Piaget's descriptions of learning as the active construction of a unique view of the world. |