Fibonacci's Money Question

We thought that Fibonacci's discovery of Hindu-Arabic numerals with Zero changed life for people in Europe. Buying and selling things became easier. Merchants like Fibonacci could do their maths easier... and make more money.

We looked at some of the pictures from his book:

Then we looked at one of the questions from his book (changed slightly):

So, three men got together as a company (a team). They all put some money together. They did some buying and selling, and because they bought things for less money and sold them for more, they ended up with more money.

They had put 50 pounds in at the start. But at the end, they had 100 pounds.

This was the question: How should they share that 100 pounds?

About a third of us thought the money should be shared equally. About a third thought some should get more than others. And about a third were not sure, or thought it was more complicated than that.

"Share equally"

"Different amounts for each person"

There were great arguments from each group. Lots of people changed their mind too.

At the end we asked, if they did get different amounts, what amount should they get? Kirill said that as they had ended up with double of what they started with, they should all get double what they put in.

It would be interesting to have any thoughts about this in the comments!

Fibonacci discovers Hindu Arabic numbers

We've been reading about Fibonacci in the book Blockhead by Joseph D'Agnese and John O'Brien:

In the book, we've been hearing how he sailed from Pisa to North Africa, and how there he discovered Hindu-Arabic numbers, and how good they are.

We looked again at the picture we'd looked at before:

Now, most of us felt that the man on the left was using the new Hindu-Arabic numbers and the man on the right was using the old way. We added some thought and speech bubbles:

We also dramatised the situation. Here's one example:

See, Think... Wonder

Miss Whittaker has made us these great posters:

and that's what we've been doing.
Together we looked closely at this image:

We saw a lot of things:

Then some thinking... Tibo thought it looked like a competition. One man looked Asian and the other European, and it looked like the woman was the judge. Felix thought the woman looked like a god. Kirill thought she looked like a Fairy of Mathematics.

Next we got into pairs and wrote what we saw and thought:

 

 

 

 

Next week we'll see what questions the picture brings to mind...

Roman numbers and an abacus

We've been looking at how Roman numbers work.

When it gets on to the big numbers, as B. said, our numbers are easier:

The Romans maybe found them hard to use too.  They didn't have electricity, so they didn't have a calculator.

Instead, some of them used an abacus:

Strangely, it's very similar to the abacus used in Japan:

We watched the first few minutes of this to see how to count on the abacus:

Then we had a look at an online abacus: