When he was a teenager, Zhang Jingzhong wandered in Fabre's insect world and chemical kingdom, and the beauty of science left a shallow mark on his heart.
Studying mathematics at Peking University and learning to extract concise and accurate laws from complex phenomena, he felt more and more wonderful. Like the adventurer who discovered the treasure, he was intoxicated and persistent in mathematical education, passing on the torch and guiding more people to appreciate this beauty.
What is the role of mathematics? Zhang Jingzhong believes that learning mathematics and cultivating mathematical literacy can exercise thinking and make people learn to think about problems.
In the early 1970s, he was teaching at a middle school in Xinjiang and saw that it was very difficult for students to learn geometry and could not do problems. He thought, how to study a good way to solve the problem? He thought of using the area relationship to solve the problem, so he studied the area method in depth and achieved very good teaching results. Later, he applied the area method to theorem machine proofs, creating principles and methods for the automatic generation of readable proofs of geometric theorems.
The idea that calculus could not be taught without talking about limits lasted for hundreds of years. Zhang Jingzhong repeatedly thought about it, and proved that it is possible to talk about integrals without talking about limits, and other mathematicians have proved that they can also talk about differentiation without talking about limits, forming a new system and making the teaching of calculus simpler.
He attributed this to himself as a "teacher": in order to teach well, he studied the problem solving methods for a long time, paid attention to the mathematics itself, and found a relatively simple general solution. In fact, Zhang Jingzhong has always regarded popular science as a lifelong career. To make mathematics easier, he proposed "educational mathematics". He compares learning mathematics to eating walnuts, mathematical education is to teach students how to smash walnuts, and educational mathematics to study how to improve the varieties of walnuts, so that the shell of walnuts is thinner, better smashed, more nutritious, reflected in mathematics is to study, transform, optimize the teaching content.
In the 1980s, Zhang Jingzhong published relevant research results for the first time, and later wrote many popular science works and articles. A 60,000-word "Mathematician's Vision", in order to write easy to understand and tasteful, he changed it back and forth, and it took 5 years to complete.
In the experimental class of Guangzhou Haizhu Experimental Middle School, students improved their average scores by 10 to 20 points to confirm the effectiveness of Zhang Jingzhong's educational mathematics achievements. These achievements have also been extended to more and more schools across the country, benefiting students. He also has a wish to write textbooks in this regard and open up a new path for mathematics education in China and the world.
【Biography】
Zhang Jingzhong
Computer scientist, mathematician and mathematics educator, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is currently the Honorary Dean of the Institute of Computing Science and Technology of Guangzhou University.
【Academician Encyclopedia】
Geometric theorem Machine proof: The principle and method of using a computer to automatically prove a certain type of geometric theorem, or even a certain kind of geometric all theorems.
Coordinator: Zhang Yingzi Chen Hongyan Written by Wu Xiaoxian