Recently the CM Define It app featured the word rectangle. When you consider the word rectangle, what other mathematical words spring to mind? What do you immediately connect with it?
We’ve used the Cambridge Mathematics (CM) Framework to generate the following visualisation to help with these questions.
Figure 1. All glossary entries in the CM Framework that are connected to the word rectangle
A word is connected to the word rectangle if both occur as glossary links in the text of the same ‘waypoint’ (piece of mathematical content). For each word, the number of waypoints where this happens is used to determine the strength of its connection to the word rectangle.
Does this match the words you thought about? Are there any surprises? Is there anything missing? Send us your thoughts on Twitter @CambridgeMaths.
As an additional challenge, can you see how each word might be connected to rectangle? For example, prime factor decomposition may seem quite unrelated, but it’s connected via the waypoint Recognising square and cube numbers. This waypoint highlights the geometrical representation of products as rectangles (with the square being a special case) and also identifies itself as helpful to the development of more complex ideas such as prime factor decomposition. The Framework provides many ways to explore such connections; for example, by finding waypoints connected by glossary entries, or following explicit ‘use of’ and ‘development of’ links between waypoints.
Please sign up for or continue to use the CM Define It app, which will help us understand what you and others would like to see in mathematical definitions.