Anthyphairesis, the “originary” core of the concept of fraction Paolo Longoni, Gianstefano Riva, Ernesto Rottoli To cite this version: Paolo Longoni, Gianstefano Riva, Ernesto Rottoli. Anthyphairesis, the “originary” core of the concept of fraction. History and Pedagogy of Mathematics, Jul 2016, Montpellier, France. hal-01349271 HAL Id: hal-01349271 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01349271 Submitted on 27 Jul 2016 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. ANTHYPHAIRESIS, THE “ORIGINARY” CORE OF THE CONCEPT OF FRACTION Paolo LONGONI, Gianstefano RIVA, Ernesto ROTTOLI Laboratorio didattico di matematica e filosofia. Presezzo, Bergamo, Italy
[email protected] ABSTRACT In spite of efforts over decades, the results of teaching and learning fractions are not satisfactory. In response to this trouble, we have proposed a radical rethinking of the didactics of fractions, that begins with the third grade of primary school. In this presentation, we propose some historical reflections that underline the “originary” meaning of the concept of fraction. Our starting point is to retrace the anthyphairesis, in order to feel, at least partially, the “originary sensibility” that characterized the Pythagorean search. The walking step by step the concrete actions of this procedure of comparison of two homogeneous quantities, results in proposing that a process of mathematisation is the core of didactics of fractions.