Ronald Shaw wrote:
Shortly after seeing your Childhood Stories request in the LMS March
Newsletter, by chance I came across Christopher Zeeman’s biography which includes:
His first memory of being fascinated by mathematics was when his mother showed him how to solve a problem when he was seven years old. The problem was: given a rectangle 3 by 4, what would be the dimensions of a rectangle inside the given one which was half the area and a left an equal width border all round. Chris still remembers his mother explaining how to solve it by introducing
for twice the width of the border. /… it was a revelation to me./ It was the one and only time he remembers discussing mathematics with his mother.
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