Math and History, Pt. II

There seemed to be a lot of books on the benefits of teaching math in history, but little evidence. I stumbled upon one study but the report contained only qualitative results. Here are some of the mathematicians I found in the various fields the article suggested, some more obscure than others: Pythagoras was a Greek religious leader, Kepler an astronomer, Aristotle a philosopher, Thales a scientist, mathematician, philosopher, and businessman, Archimedes an inventor, mathematician, physicist, engineer, and astronomer, and Charles Marie de la Condamine an explorer,mathematician, and scientist (I'd never heard of him but he was sent by the French to measure the world circumference at the equator). Most of the resources I found were for higher-level mathematics, but I found a few activities that may be practical. At
I found a worksheet on "Big Numbers" that described the origins of the name googol and an activity like one Archimedes did to guess how many grains of sand there were to determine how many candies it would take to fill a classroom. I think this would work starting about grade three. The other specific activity I found was about fractals and chaos. Though I never heard of these until last year, the activity itself is simple, a dice game to create the Sierpinski triangle, and I think it could be a fun way to get fifth graders interested in math, perhaps. It was at
http://math.bu.edu/DYSYS/chaos-game/node1.html#SECTION00010000000000000000. So basically I couldn't find any proof that integrating history is beneficial, but for better or worse I found some resources for doing so. Whereas the second activity is rather extraneous, the first activity would likely be curriculum-relevant, and an educational prelude to snack time :)