I was absolutely intrigued in today’s maths lecture about maths in astronomy. In my previous blog post, I argued that mathematics was apparent in every single thing on earth. However, after today, I realise that it goes beyond the earth into our universe. This blog aims to pick out the fundamental mathematics in space and how it can be applied to the classroom.

An important point about today’s lecture was the idea that there are millions upon millions of stars in our universe (approximately 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.) That idea completely sums up that the universe is a massive place. However, I am not blogging about the numbers and facts about space, but I am trying to delve in to the fundamental maths. A potential aspect of fundamental mathematics in space is potentially base systems. The fact that massive numbers are used to represent how far a planet is away from another or how big or the diameter of a certain planet is. Without the basic knowledge of numbers, this would not be possible to comprehend. In addition to this, take distance for example, to define how far away a particular object is, we use KM. Therefore, we have to have a basic knowledge of distance. For example, if we only used millimetres to measure distances, we would be there all day and it would cause some sort of confusion if you were to give someone directions.

Continuing on the idea of fundamental mathematics, the notion of light years was introduced and what excited me was that a light year is the distance light travels is one year. If we look up at the night sky and we see many bright and sparkling stars looking back at us. However, what is apparent is that those stars have probably imploded years ago. The closest star to us is four light years away. So basically if the star had imploded, we wouldn’t know until four years later. I find that concept fascinating and it highlights that space is huge. In addition to this, when looking at galaxies, I found Fibonacci’s sequence in amongst it all. You can see our milky way twisitng and spiralling to create a very beautiful scenery.

So how can this be introduced in the wider context? Or within the context of the classroom? Luckily, I have had some experience with this during my first year placement. What it was mostly concerned with was the idea of learning facts and figures, naming the planets, and making wall displays. I completely understand that this was the children’s topic work, but it would be so beneficial to apply mathematics to this topic, especially fundamental mathematics. Gaining a good knowledge of the solar systems is good, but we as teachers should be giving our children opportunities to explore the notion of maths in astronomy and play around with it. This would make for a much more interesting lesson and would probably be more beneficial than learning facts and figures. The ideal thing about mathematics is the idea that it can be playful and experimental and fundamental maths allows this due to bringing ideas back to basics and then building the learning up and up.