Why teach math history?

 
Before reading, I wasn't sold on the idea of incorporating history into math lessons. Sure, I thought, maybe there are some cases where it's interesting or helpful to see how an idea was developed, but with a curriculum that's already full it's hard to justify moving focus from 'real math' onto something that doesn't obviously help with mathematical thinking.

The arguments made, though, were pretty compelling. In particular, I really appreciated the idea of teaching math as a human cultural activity, and using that to motivate students who aren't enthused about abstract ideas. If we can show that math, like art, is a celebration of human ingenuity and creativity, hopefully students will grow to appreciate it more.

In the end, though, the thing that best convinced me was the way that, as I read through the many examples of interesting historical contexts to familiar problems, I became excited about revisiting areas of math that I had never found very interesting in the first place. For example, when I learned in university about the representation of 3D rotations by quaternions, the context-free deductive style of presentation left me frustrated and confused. But when reading about the intuitive way in which this math was developed, I was able to make connections that I hadn't earlier, and see why quaternions were a reasonable way to compute rotations. Throughout the article there were many other such times where it proved its own point by inspiring my curiosity about math that I had thought was dry and impenetrable, and I can't think of a more convincing way to demonstrate the value of using historical context in the math classroom.