• Education of Primary School Mathematics
• /
• v.17 no.1
• /
• pp.17-40
• /
• 2014

To improve elementary mathematics education teaching and learning method and environment, the survey of elementary school students' attitude toward mathematics and their images on mathematician was conducted to mathematically gifted students and non-gifted students of 6th grade of elementary school. The study results show that mathematically gifted elementary students have deeper understanding of mathematician and their works than non-gifted students. But they are not enthusiastic to be a mathematician. On average, awareness of domestic mathematician is turned to be significantly low. And most students don't know well of mathematician. Since this study was applied to the limited range of objects, significant results were not shown in external and internal image of mathematician. Thus, the future study needs to generalize the study results by compensating this defect and developing various materials to improve students' attitude toward mathematics and images of mathematician.

• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
• /
• no.7
• /
• pp.165-188
• /
• 2009

In the development of linear perspective, Brook Taylor's theory has achieved a special position. With his method described in Linear Perspective(1715) and New Principles of Linear Perspective(1719), the subject of linear perspective became a generalized and abstract theory rather than a practical method for painters. He is known to be the first who used the term 'vanishing point'. Although a similar concept has been used form the early stage of Renaissance linear perspective, he developed a new method of British perspective technique of measure points based on the concept of 'vanishing points'. In the 15th and 16th century linear perspective, pictorial space is considered as independent space detached from the outer world. Albertian method of linear perspective is to construct a pavement on the picture in accordance with the centric point where the centric ray of the visual pyramid strikes the picture plane. Comparison to this traditional method, Taylor established the concent of a vanishing point (and a vanishing line), namely, the point (and the line) where a line (and a plane) through the eye point parallel to the considered line (and the plane) meets the picture plane. In the traditional situation like in Albertian method, the picture plane was assumed to be vertical and the center of the picture usually corresponded with the vanishing point. On the other hand, Taylor emphasized the role of vanishing points, and as a result, his method entered the domain of projective geometry rather than Euclidean geometry. For Taylor's theory was highly abstract and difficult to apply for the practitioners, there appeared many perspective treatises based on his theory in England since 1740s. Joshua Kirby's Dr. Brook Taylor's Method of Perspective Made Easy, Both in Theory and Practice(1754) was one of the most popular treatises among these posterior writings. As a well-known painter of the 18th century English society and perspective professor of the St. Martin's Lane Academy, Kirby tried to bridge the gap between the practice of the artists and the mathematical theory of Taylor. Trying to ease the common readers into Taylor's method, Kirby somehow abbreviated and even omitted several crucial parts of Taylor's ideas, especially concerning to the inverse problems of perspective projection. Taylor's theory and Kirby's handbook reveal us that the development of linear perspective in European society entered a transitional phase in the 18th century. In the European tradition, linear perspective means a representational system to indicated the three-dimensional nature of space and the image of objects on the two-dimensional surface, using the central projection method. However, Taylor and following scholars converted linear perspective as a complete mathematical and abstract theory. Such a development was also due to concern and interest of contemporary artists toward new visions of infinite space and kaleidoscopic phenomena of visual perception.