Modeling The Use of History of Mathematical Thought in Mathematics Instruction

摘要

Mathematics is a human creation, which has been developing for more than four thousand years. It emerged as a response to different social and economic needs of civilizations. Historical development of mathematics stresses that mathematics as a science has always been connected to economic and social context and development of society. There is little or no research that promotes using historical content in mathematics lessons in the Nigeria context. In this paper, we model the use of history of mathematical thought (HMT) in mathematics instruction and solved the formulated model equation using integrating factor. The rate at which HMT is used by teachers in mathematics instruction is assumed to be proportional to the number of teachers that do not use HMT. The analysis suggests that with time, only a fraction of teachers can use HMT in teaching mathematics due to the fact that they will not remember to use it, and additional recruitment of teachers will result in only marginal improvement in the usage of HMT.