comparative math & science links

I love this stuff. It helps counteract an assumption that all useful and intelligent things came from Europe to the rest of the world. (Case in point: we were discussing multicultural contributions to science & learning and one person couldn't think of anything from China besides Chinese restaurants! This was a future social studies teacher mind you!!!!)

It's also an intriguing way to think about how multiple solutions relate to the same problem.

Anyway, only one link so far (the inspiration for this post of course):

Calendaropaedia, all about calendars around the world. Here is the description from its home page:

Since the dawn of civilisation man has kept track of time by use of the sun, the moon, and the stars. Man noticed that time could be broken up into units of the day (the time taken for the earth to rotate once on its axis), the month (the time taken for the moon to orbit the earth) and the year (the time taken for the earth to orbit the sun).

This information was needed so as to know when to plant crops and when to hold religious ceremonies. The problems were that a month is not made up of an integral number of days, a year is not made of an integral number of months and neither is a year made up of an integral number of days. This caused man to use his ingenuity to overcome these problems and produce a calendar which enabled him to keep track of time.

The ways in which these problems were tackled down the centuries and across the world is the subject of this Web site. It is recommended that you start by looking at the Comparison of Calendars.

Do--it's fascinating! From the Aztec Empire to the French Revolution, everyone had their own solution.