Back to School
in the Silicon Forest
We’re in back to school mode in my community. We’re in that week after Labor Day and, in Portland, Oregon we’re looking ahead to a hot next few days, soaring to over a hundred Fahrenheit, which is high for around here, in a Pacific coastal rainforest ecosystem.
I’m a back office curriculum developer with connections to the regional technology sector, dubbed Silicon Forest by local historians, in contrast to California’s Silicon Valley.
The term “silicon” suggests “chips” and “computers”. We’ve also morphed it to suggest “nanotechnology” in this Age of Carbon (as some call it), wherein science turns its attention to organic molecules and higher life forms. Aside from computers, our region is into healthcare. These go together.
Whereas history teachers are usually content to leave the mathematics to other classrooms, the intellectual history aspect of our collective narrative is sometimes topical.
When were complex numbers invented, or discovered, and what purpose did they serve?
Some discussion of polynomials, if only to define them (a sum of monomials) then ensues, leading up to the Mandelbrot Set.
