External Event

I will use Indigenous knowledge to teach mathematical thinking through traditional string designs. According to Diné/Navajo teachings, spiders taught people how to create string designs, and these activities are traditionally practiced during the winter when insects are hibernating. The lesson will incorporate Navajo winter storytelling, including the teachings of Spider Woman, who represents creativity, problem-solving, and perseverance.

The game Spot-It, played with 55 cards each pair of which is known to have exactly 1 symbol in common (of the 8 symbols printed on the cards), is well-known for its design via a projective plane of order 7. A similar game can be constructed with words, each pair of which has a single letter in common, provided we can find the configuration of a projective plane within a graph constructed of words. In this talk, Professor Edward Doolittle of First Nations University of Canada will demonstrate an efficient method for searching for projective plane configurations and related configurations in graphs obtained from dictionaries in various languages, including English, French, and some of the Indigenous languages of Canada, in particular Plains Cree written in Standard Roman Orthography (SRO) and Plains Cree written in Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics.

Ten years ago, I was asked to Indigenise curriculum in Mathematics at the University that I worked for at the time. Since I didn’t know how to go about that, I began a project exploring this, supported by the mathematics research centre CARMA. We started with small teams of two or three leaders around each of half a dozen themes, with each team including at least one Indigenous person and at least one University-based Mathematician; and the IUM (Indigenising University Maths) project and knowledge community has grown from there: see https://carmamaths.org/iumproject/. I will reflect on my learnings within this journey.