The most interesting part of his article is the creation of the stick charts as mattang that was used to explicate the principles of swell and land interaction. From my perspective, Marshallese mattgang, which is a simplification of a real-world system, visualizes refraction, reflection and diffraction of swells through geometrical ideas including perpendicular bisector, intersection, arc and so on. Marshallese wisdom is not only reflected in modeling the swell phenomenon with a certain purpose in mind, selectively eliminating some microscopial factors that have limited impact on the system, but also reflected in their teaching philosophy which emphasizes visual and kinesthetic information while training navigators - “in fact, one navigator recounted that an early part of his training was being made to float in the water at various places in order to learn how to feel what would later be shown and explained to him.” Embodied mathematics is significant in the history of mathematic...
