Blog Post #5: History of Babylonian Word Problems

Throughout my reading of the text, I found myself trying to answer the question found on the first page. Why have word problems persisted through time and culture despite not being purposefully preserved? I loved this question in class and wanted to pick up answer from this reading. With the use of word problems concerning unrealistic 8-story high piles of grain, it's easy to think that these were simply to get a good laugh out of people or they were just for fun or for a challenge (pure) which would be easy and enjoyable to preserve. However, I found myself thinking: does a word problem have to be practical for it to have teachable concepts? Perhaps the teachability is why these were preserved throughout time. These word problems could simply be for beginners with no application to the real world or perhaps just be using easier numbers than in real life that prepare students for the soon to come real world problems. I assume the latter to be the case. After all, we find these types of problems in our schools today in contemporary mathematics! 

For example:

Susie buys 44 apple and gives 11 to her friend Tommy. What fraction of her apples did she give away? What fraction does she still have?

This question is unrealistic but it's undeniable that it has applications to real world mathematics. Kids will learn fractions and use them in real-life problems that don't involve so many apples. Whether pure or applied, I feel that they are useful.I'm not 100% sure what was meant by Høyrup when they stated "Even when Old Babylonian mathematics is pure in substance it remains applied in form" but I assume he was implying that the problems were only to demonstrate the "methods at hand", similar to my belief. 

This thought aside, I thought it was very interesting that practicality was not the core of word problems in Babylonian times.