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Iconic Arithmetic | Iconic Math

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T he Image is of the Greek Tetraktys, the philosophical/metaphysical icon of the Pythagorean School.  Little wonder the Greeks saw whole numbers as magical, cause the Tetraktys exposes so many tightly coupled numerical relations.  Each set of arrows in the image shows the geometric mean. The physical principles and the common sense activities of arithmetic were lost at the turn of the twentieth century when mathematics committed to the abstract Rules of Symbolic Algebra.  These symbolic rules were then propagated in textbooks and classrooms as what arithmetic is and as what we must know in order to be able to “do” arithmetic.  The abstract rules of symbol manipulation that are currently taught in all classrooms are not how arithmetic works, they are how typographical symbols must work when those symbols are used to convey the simple physical principles of arithmetic. The arithmetic used by people is based in physical behavior, not in abstract symbols. Iconic arithmetic reintroduces the

The Image is of the Greek Tetraktys, the philosophical/metaphysical icon of the Pythagorean School. Little wonder the Greeks saw whole numbers as magical, cause the Tetraktys exposes so many tightly coupled numerical relations. Each set of arrows in the image shows the geometric mean. The physical principles and the common sense activities of arithmetic were lost at the turn of the twentieth century when mathematics committed to the abstract Rules of Symbolic Algebra. These symbolic rules were then propagated in textbooks and classrooms as what arithmetic is and as what we must know in…

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