Israeli College Using Talmudic Methods for Teaching Math

This is just another cool thing that could only happen in Israel.

According to Dr. David Zeitun, head of Orot College in Elkanah, Israel has low math scores in comparison to other countries. In order to counteract this, Orot College is basing some of their math cirriculum on algorithms and pedagogical techniques developed by Jewish Sages over the generations. Dr. Zeiten believes this will help to improve Israeli students’ dwindling math achievements and motivate new Torah-oriented math teachers.

Three topics he plans to feature in the new math cirriculum is
-Traditional Jewish teaching methods
-various scholarly books written by Jewish Sages on math calculations, and
-Talmudic passages having to do with math.
These include repetition of verses and Mishnayot (which can be applied to multiplication tables), the extraction of the ‘bottom line’ law from amidst complex argumentation (and avoiding the long and confusing explanations that are often found in new math books), the use of stories, and more.

The Orot College is “dedicated to education and representing academia in the spirit of Torah,” its website says, and wishes to train new math teachers among the religious public. “We would like the young religious public to view teaching math - and not just Bible and Talmud – as an important mission,” Dr. Zeitun says.

Dr. Zeitun noted that many Jewish scholars, such as Maimonides (Rambam), Gersonides (Ralbag), the Maharal, and others, wrote scholarly treatises on math topics, and these should be recognized today. In addition, the Talmud is replete with math calculations such as figuring out the area of a round Sukkah, the circumference of Jerusalem, astronomical calculations that predict with pinpoint accuracy when the new moon will appear hundreds of years in advance, and more (including on today’s daily page, Bava Batra 13).

It was noted that the great German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss has been credited with discovering, when he was a boy over 200 years ago, a quick way of summing up numbers in an arithmetic series - which has become the accepted method for doing so. In fact, however, the method appeared hundreds of years earlier in a popular Talmudic commentary by the Tosafists in Tractate Sukkah. Dr. Zeitun noted that the famous French number theorist Fermat studied under Gersonides.

Having recently merged with Moreshet Yaakov College, Orot is now the largest and most diversified of all religious academic teaching colleges in Israel. A total of some 1,500 students are registered this year for full-time undergraduate studies, with another 150 M.A. students.

(Source: Arutz Sheva)