Beauty and Serendipity in Teaching Mathematics

摘要

Serendipity has been defined as the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy and beneficial way. Beauty is described by one dictionary as "a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that brings pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit." This paper gives examples of how these two aspects of experience have influenced what I would like to see in mathematics classrooms and my curriculum development work to engender them, prior to and through the work of the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project.