Search results for "Exact science"
showing 3 items of 3 documents
From Graz to Göttingen: Neugebauer’s Early Intellectual Journey
2016
Otto Neugebauer’s early academic career was marked by a series of transitions. His interests shifted from physics to mathematics, and finally to the history of ancient mathematics and exact sciences. Yet even from his early years in Graz, Neugebauer was strongly attracted to the mathematical culture of Gottingen. When he arrived there in 1922, he quickly established a strong personal friendship with Richard Courant, the newly appointed Director of the Mathematics Institute. Neugebauer and Courant worked together closely up until 1933, when the Nazi government decimated the Gottingen scientific community. In this essay, Neugebauer’s historical work and his vision for a new approach to the st…
Finnish Students’ Engagement in Science Lessons
2015
The decreasing number of students who are engaged in science learning has been recognised as a problem. The pre-conditions of engagement and actual engagement were examined using a novel research method to obtain detailed information on Finnish students’ engagement in different situations and to gain a better understanding of this phenomenon. The study’s participants consisted of 68 students (31 girls, 37 boys) from 9th grade and 67 students (46 girls, 21 boys) from 1st grade in upper secondary school. The research aimed to answer the following question: How does Finnish students’ engagement occur in exact and life science lessons? Participants received smartphones equipped with a smartphon…
Otto Neugebauer and the Göttingen Approach to History of the Exact Sciences
2018
Otto Neugebauer (1899–1990) was, for many, an enigmatic personality. Trained as a mathematician in Graz, Munich, and Gottingen, he had not yet completed his doctoral research when in 1924 Harald Bohr, brother of the famous physicist, invited him to Copenhagen to work together on Bohr’s new theory of almost periodic functions. Quite by chance, Bohr asked Neugebauer to write a review of T. Eric Peet’s recently published edition of the Rhind Papyrus (Neugebauer 1925). In the course of doing so, Neugebauer became utterly intrigued by Egyptian methods for calculating fractions as sums of unit fractions (e.g. 3/5 = 1/3 + 1/5 + 1/15). When he returned to Gottingen, he wrote his dissertation on thi…