Games and Mathematics

Of late, I have developed an interest in looking at math from a historical lens. In the post, 'An Absence of History', I made a case for bringing the origins of different topics in math into the curriculum as a way of helping children engage with the subject. During my subsequent research, I wound up back at the very beginning in an attempt to understand what factors promoted the birth of different domains in mathematics. A distilled version of my findings is shown below.

Out of these six activities, 'Games' is the one that caught my attention. Having been both physically and mentally hyperactive as a child, I expended my energy in a variety of traditional sports - athletics, tennis, table tennis, badminton, basketball, cycling and cricket - and also in games that involved running and catching. Games like chess and carrom and activities such as puzzles served to satiate my need for mental stimulation.

As my mind ran over the different games that I engaged with in the past, I began to discover elements of mathematics embedded in many of them. Over the coming posts, I will analyse some of the games that I played as a child through a mathematical lens. As an outcome of this exploration, I hope to show how young children intuitively use math in games and organically develop ways of applying it in the course of these games.

As you read these posts perhaps you, the reader, may reflect on your own childhood games and start to see features in them that had hitherto remained hidden! 😃