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The Chinese discovered this triangle in about 1100 AD but it wasn't until Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician, wrote his treatise in 1655 that the world knew about this triangles incredible importance. In China, they do not call it Pascal's Triangle, they call it Yang Hui's Triangle after the man who discovered it in China. But as usual, Pascal gets all the credit.

Years before children learn about the concept of multiplication, they are actually using this concept every day as they observe rectangular grids of 2x2, 2x3, 3x3, 3x4, 5x6, 10x10 and so forth. They recognize these numbers as 4, 6, 9, 12, 30, and 100, respectively. What they really mean is that number of square units--a two dimensional concept.

A polygon is a shape that consists only of straight edges and the shape must be closed.  In addition, the edges must not cross over each other. A polygon with the fewest sides is the triangle although some of the children tried to draw a polygon with only two edges. The fact that they were determined to do this was amazing.

We counted polygons by number of sides (3-12): triangle, quadrilateral, pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, octagon, nonagon, decagon, undecagon, and dodecagon.

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