Chapters include: (1) 'Whither Algorithms? Mathematics Educators Express Their Views' (Lorna J. The papers included in this book cover a wide variety of topics, including student-invented algorithms, the assessment of such algorithms, algorithms from history and other cultures, ways that algorithms grow and change, and the importance of algorithms in a technological world.

You can easily get applications that show these sort of things for you on the current date (I like 'StarChart', free from the Windows 'Store'), but the book lets you work these things out for yourself, if you feel you would like to do so.This 1998 yearbook aims to stimulate and answer questions that all educators of mathematics need to consider to adapt school mathematics for the 21st century. There is no doubt that the content is technical, and intended to show the reader how to perform some very complex calculations in order to determine various astronomical events and conditions (another example, the orientation of the rings of Saturn on a given date) so will only be of interest to someone intending to perform those calculations himself. Some astronomical calculations can be very complex, so this was a godsend. I coded the equations, and inserted check points at every stage, and could compare the values I determined with those determined by Mr Meeus in his example, so if I had introduced an error, I knew exactly where in my code to look for it.

I particularly found the worked examples to be priceless. Some things may be less useful: The smallest circle containing three celestial bodies, for example. Some things may be really useful to an astronomer: If you want to be able to discover the positions of the moons of Jupiter for a specific date, the book tells you how. This book is expensive, but if you are interested in all things astronomical, it is a 'must have'. There is information to help with these calculations on the web, but the lay out is sometimes difficult to follow, and I have found errors in the presented data on occasion. I am an amateur programmer, and like to program astronomical things, such as a planetary orrery that updates every day, and can be animated into the future, plus Earth data such as equinoxes, moon phases, sun rise and set and such like.

Astronomical algorithms 1998 pdf