A Sojourn Through Geometry and Algebra

This textbook is intended for college juniors or seniors majoring in mathematics, who plan to become high school teachers. It seeks to provide a deeper perspective on secondary mathematics, showing the interplay between plane geometry and algebra. A distinctive characteristic of the book is the frequent discussion of multiple paths to the solution of a problem or the proof of a theorem. Practically none of the topics covered in the book overlap with the content of courses taken by mathematics majors, say real analysis, abstract algebra, differential equations, combinatorics, probability and statistics, number theory, etc. These courses, and several others, provide indispensable mathematical maturity but are rather distant from the core of high school mathematics. Precisely, one of our main objectives is to bridge the gap between the latter and college-level mathematics.

The author is Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at East Tennessee State University. His main academic interests are the interrelationship between mathematics and the natural sciences, as well as the use of the history of mathematics as a pedagogical tool.