June 20, 1980

NEW SOLIDARITY Page 12

Teaching Geometry by Plato's Method

NYC Class Key to Reviving U.S. Science Education by Laurence Hecht

The author demonstrates slicing of a parabola from a clay cone. Box determines proper angle to ensure that slice is parallel to side of cone.

A class series in geometry now being attended by about 200 members and cothinkers of the International Caucus of Labor Committees in New York is testing and refining an approach to science education that could revolutionize the entire U.S. science and mathematics curriculum.

By applying a unique conception of what the subject of geometry is, the class has, in the course of 10 weeks, taken a considerable portion of the students to a higher mathematical conceptual level than is normally attained in four years of college mathematics. Similar classes have since begun in Philadelphia and Chicago. A workbook compiling the experience of the New York class is now in production to allow rapid spreading of this method. Modeled on French Ecole Polytechnique Throwing out the usual texts, especially Euclid, the class is reviving a method of teaching and an approach to the subject that came into full bloom at the turn of the 19th century in France's Ecole Polytechnique. Instructors Uwe Parpart, energy adviser to the LaRouche presidential campaign, and Carol White, author of the text Energy Potential have modeled the organization of the class on that used in the French cole.

Light box demonstrates point at infinity where parallel lines converge. Shown above, it projects ellipse.

The French nation, shortly before the turn of the 19th century, was faced with a crisis with profound similarities to the crisis in the United States today. Science and the very notion of human progress were under attack by the British-instigated Jacobin forces. The founding of the Ecole Polytechnique as an institute for higher scientific learning represented a conscious effort to educate a scientific elite who could restore the nation to a path of industrial development, and revitalize its military practice so as to guarantee sovereignty.

Plato's Method About 75 of the 200 students attending the weekly two and-a-half hour lecture held in a New York public school auditorium are also pursuing weekly seminars that meet in groups of up to a dozen individuals for problem solving and intensive work. These are taught by a core group of 10 seminar leaders who themselves meet weekly with the lecturers. In the Ecole these were known as the "would-be instructors." While this resembles in form the subject as still taught at some universities, the content is entirely different. Whereas a typical college course defines a given body of knowledge as its subject matter, the actual subject of this class series is the method of thinking that generates the body of knowledge, not the fixed knowledge itself. Geometry, properly taught, is the method of thinking appropriate to solving problems in the physical world and is therefore superior to any fixed body of accumulated knowledge. Master it, and you have mastered nature. This doesn't exactly mean that some sort of "pure thought" is the only subject matter in this class series. On the contrary, constructions with compass and ruler and the building of three-dimensional models have been encouraged and used in all the classes, while the physical actions associated with geometric properties are the basis of teaching. What is different in content is that instead of the axiomatic approach of Euclid's geometry, instructors White and Parpart are stressing concepts derived from the Platonic method such as the invariance of properties under projection and the singularities that a particular geometry imposes on space, illustrated, for example, by the "point at infinity." Walking With Giant Steps Proceeding in this way, the instructors have been able to move the class rapidly from relatively simple problems to advanced considerations, effectively leaping over many in-between steps that the traditional approach requires before advanced material is comprehensible. It is certainly not the case that in a mere 10 weekly sessions, every student has turned into a qualified mathematician. However, most students who have attended the class and seminars have had the feeling at least at some points of moving forwardto use the expression of the Ecole Polytechnique's founder Gaspard Monge"on a road where every one had to walk with giant steps."

Parabola vs. Hyperbola An example of a problem actually considered over several class sessions can help to clarify the unique method used in the class. Ask a person of some mathematics or physics training, what is the difference between the two curves known as the parabola and the hyperbola, and you will probably get one of two sorts of answers. If you are more fortunate, your knowledgeable friend will offer you a description of the distinct features of each curve, telling you for example, that the hyperbola, as it spreads out, approaches two lines called asymptotes. Perhaps he would add a "locus" description, explaining that the parabola has a point (focus) and line (directrix) from which any point on the curve is equidistant. On the other hand, if your mathematically inclined friend should be of the algebraicist persuasionand also devoid of all human sympathyhe might toss at you the general equation for each of the two curves, remarking, "there, can't you see, the difference is right there." Neither of these descriptions would be foreign to any student of Plato or of Gaspard Monge, though such a student would never answer you in that way. Rather, upon coming across you pondering over so seemingly simple a problem as this one, the first thing he might wonder is whether all your faculties of perception were intact, or whether, like some poor mite, you were confined to crawl around on the two-dimensional plane, compass and ruler in hand, trying to determine the aspects of the local real estate without ever being able to lift your eyes to the space above. Once recognizing that you were not so handicapped, but merely suffering the ill effects of a faulty education, the student of Plato or Monge would likely begin an explanation something as follows: The first thing you want to look at, my friend, in considering the properties of a two-dimensional figure, is to imagine how that curve might have been generated from a higher dimension. And when you consider the hyperbola and parabola, the appropriate three-dimensional figure to look at is the cone. Referring you to a diagram like the one pictured here, he would show you how by slicing the cone exactly parallel to one of its sides, the resultant cross section is a perfect parabola, while a cut made at an even sharper angle to the vertical produces the hyperbola (or two hyperbolas, since the sharper

The conic sections: Four distinct plane figures are produced by slicing the cone in varying ways. Plane A produces the hyperbola; plane B, the parabola; plane C, the ellipse; and plane D, the circle.

angle also cuts upward into the inverted cone atop). And there, by merely determining your angle of slicing to be parallel to the side or sharper than parallel, you have determined the distinction between parabola and hyperbola. Projective View "But now," he would probably say, "let me take you a step further by considering the same object projectively." Describing to you an apparatus similar to the light box pictured in the accompanying photograph, he would propose that you build it and conduct a simple experiment. By placing a square of cardboard with a circle of appropriate size cut out of it on top of the box, the light coming from a lamp inside is channeled into the shape of an oblique cone that then projects onto the screen as the conic sections. The light source is located in the bottom of the box shining upward, and touching the face which is opposite the screen or wall you are projecting onto. Depending on the position at which the cardboard circle is placed with respect to the light source, the cone is effectively being "sliced" by the screen into one of the four conic sections. When you place the circle in the unique position where it is just tangent to the face of the box above the light, you will see projected on the screen a parabola. Examining the accompanying photograph, you will see a remarkable feature of the parabola projection. The lines which are drawn to converge at the point where the cardboard circle is tangent to the light box are projected on the screen as parallel lines. Why? Examine the light box and you see that this point lies directly over the light source and thus is projected straight upward, never intersecting the screen. It is the "point at infinity" in the projection. This is the unique point where lines which actually converge on the circle are turned into parallel lines on the screen. Such a point is not visible to the poor creature crawling around on the Euclidean plane. It requires moving up into the higher dimensionviewing the figure projectivelyto see this singular point which defines the parabola from a higher standpoint. To make the hyperbola, move the circle so it overlaps the edge of the box. Now there are two points where the circle intersects this edge of the box and hence two points at infinity. A new definition of the distinction between the

two curves has emerged, and one that has far-reaching significance for higher mathematics, providing a direct path to the mathematician Riemann's method of classifying curvatures and the partial differential equations that describe them as hyperbolic, parabolic, or elliptical.