Blog Post #10: Volume of a Pyramid Project Reflection

A huge takeaway for me from this project is how embedded math has been in cultures throughout history even if it's not obvious. Taking 20-30 years each to build, a pyramid would typically hold between 1-2 million stones which each weighed around 1-3 tonnes. The labor necessary to build the pyramids must have ruled their lives! And to have calculated the height of the great pyramids to correspond to the age of the Pharaoh who was buried inside to the nearest month showed how mathematics is part of their cultural expression. I imagine that this calculation would have had to be done before they started building, since they'd have to find the resulting volume to in turn calculate how large to make the base. Without the math skills that they possessed, where would they have laid to rest their Pharaohs and kings? Without certain math skills, I imagine that their lives would have been incredibly different! Perhaps the pyramids would have come down to trial and error, or not worked well at all!

I also learned that even though these methods that ancient peoples used were so simple, they have such complex applications and were still so accurate which is a lesson in itself and applicable to many math lessons in the classroom. As an example of this, Egyptians would find the approximate volume of a pyramid by cutting it into slices (which wasn't hard given the layers of similarly tall blocks they used) and finding the volume of each slice. The smaller the slice, the more accurate, which is a simpler representation of limits. This project changed how I would teach in a classroom environment because I realized that there's a multitude of ways to build up to a more in-depth topic (such as limits) and that there is no single correct progression in math lessons. Perhaps some can use the Egyptian method to better visualize the eventual use of limits as they're introduced to this topic, and some may have an easier time with how other ancient civilizations went about the problem.