Quick Facts
Biography
Claudia Zaslavsky (January 12, 1917 – January 13, 2006) was an American mathematics educator and ethnomathematician.
Life
Zaslavsky was born on January 12, 1917 in New York City, and grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She studied mathematics at Hunter College and the University of Michigan, but was forced to leave full-time work and take care of her family during World War II, while her husband was away in the US Army.
After the war and after her children grew older, she became a private high school mathematics teacher in Hartsdale, New York. After moving to a racially integrated public school, she began to learn about the history of mathematics in Africa and incorporate it into her classroom material in order to capture the interest of the African-American students in her classes.
One of her sons, Alan Zaslavsky, became a statistician, and another, Thomas Zaslavsky, became a mathematician. She died of pancreatic cancer on January 13, 2006.
Books
Zaslavsky's books include:
- Africa Counts: Number and Pattern in African Cultures (Prindle, Weber, and Schmidt, 1973; 3rd ed., Chicago Review Press, 1999)
- Preparing Young Children for Math: A Book of Games (Schocken, 1979)
- Count On Your Fingers African Style (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1980)
- Math Comes Alive: Activities from Many Cultures (J. Weston Walch, 1987)
- Tic-Tac-Toe (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1982}
- Zero: Is it Something? is it Nothing? (Watts, 1989)
- Multicultural Mathematics: Interdisciplinary Cooperative-learning Activities, Gr. 6-9 (1993)
- Multicultural Math: Hands-On Math Activities from Around the World (Scholastic, 1994)
- Fear of Math: How to Get Over It and Get On With Your Life (Rutgers University Press, 1994)
- The Multicultural Math Classroom: Bringing in the World (Heinemann, 1996)
- Math Games and Activities from Around the World (Chicago Review Press, 1998)
- Number Sense and Nonsense: Building Math Creativity and Confidence Through Number Play (Chicago Review Press, 2001)
- More Math Games and Activities from Around the World (Chicago Review Press, 2003)