Abraham Lincoln’s Missing Math Homework Found!

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Read about how math teachers at the Illinois State University were able to rejoin a loose page of young Abraham Lincoln’s math problems with ten other surviving pages, in a post by ISU’s Media Relations.

From the post:

“The discovery of an 11th leaf of Lincoln’s oldest manuscript is an exciting addition to the corpus of Lincoln’s early writings,” said Daniel W. Stowell, director of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln project. “We are grateful to Drs. Ellerton and Clements both for this discovery and for their careful examination and reordering of the pages separated 150 years ago. Their expertise in the field of mathematics education sheds new light on this enigmatic document from Lincoln’s early life.”

The Papers of Abraham Lincoln will include this document among the more than 100,000 documents it expects to locate, image, transcribe, annotate, and publish online in the years ahead.

In April 2010, the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, together with the University of Chicago and Brown University, announced the electronic reuniting of two fragments from another leaf of Lincoln’s arithmetic copybook. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, published in 1953, began with copies of the then known 10 leaves of this manuscript, but included only the half fragment from Brown University. The matching half page was discovered in November, 2009 at the University of Chicago.