Number line in the history and the education of mathematics

Abstract

In modern mathematics curricula in primary and secondary education, number line is an important supervisory tool for understanding many concepts, such as different types of numbers, equations, and more. The use of the number line is supported by a large number of researchers, but there are also studies showing that students find it difficult to use. Although the concept of number line is important for teaching and there is a great deal of debate about its use, as far as we know, there are very few systematic studies that examine the epistemological development of some components regarding the concept of number line throughout history and correlate this development by learning this concept from the students. However, there are no studies that examine the concept of historical development of the number line as a whole or relate it to student behavior. In this paper, therefore, the first attempt has been made to examine the overall development of the concept of number line in the history of mathematics. We have therefore studied the historical evolution of the concept of number line and divided it into periods, according to the characteristics of this evolution. It seems that based on the slow mathematical integration of the concept of number line at the end of the 19th century, but also on some other critical points in the four historical periods that we have analyzed, some of the difficulties that students encounter when using it are likely to be epistemological obstacles.

Keywords

• number line
• historical evolution
• epistemological obstacle
• concept representation