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The Rise of the American New Math Movement: How National Security Anxiety and Mathematical Modernism Disrupted the School Curriculum

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Modern Mathematics

Part of the book series: History of Mathematics Education ((HME))

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Abstract

In the 1940s, the teaching of mathematics in the secondary schools of the United States began to recover from a long period of disrespect. This augmented prestige was due in part to an increased demand for mathematically trained workers arising from World War II and the Cold War. At the same time, undergraduate mathematics instruction was undergoing revision, bringing it more into line with the “modern” viewpoint of research mathematicians, focused on unifying concepts and “structures.” There was a sentiment among a significant segment of mathematics educators that school mathematics had become too estranged from these exciting new developments. This environment encouraged, in the 1950s, the development of innovative secondary school curriculum programs, featuring higher levels of abstraction and precision of language. The University of Illinois Committee on School Mathematics (UICSM) was an early, and notably radical, exemplar, while the School Mathematics Study Group (SMSG) was the largest and best-funded program. By the end of the 1950s optimism that the “New Math” would fundamentally and permanently change the school curriculum for the better was widespread, although far from universal.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The reader is hereby alerted that this chapter will employ these and other acronyms with regularity.

  2. 2.

    The first reference to Bourbaki in the Monthly occurred in 1950 and will be noted later in this chapter. The first reference to Bourbaki in the Mathematics Teacher appears to have been a short note by Phillip S. Jones (1951).

  3. 3.

    At this time the department of mathematics in the College was administratively separate from the department inhabited by the University’s research mathematicians.

  4. 4.

    Italics in original.

  5. 5.

    With slight abuse of historical exactness, we will here use only CUPM.

  6. 6.

    This appears to be the first time Bourbaki was mentioned in any way in the Monthly. The article was a translation, by Arnold Dresden, of Bourbaki’s original French article of 1948.

  7. 7.

    This group was for a time known as the University of Illinois Committee on Secondary School Mathematics (UICSSM), but it has been more generally known as UICSM, and this is the acronym we will employ.

  8. 8.

    Underlining in original.

  9. 9.

    Underlining in original.

  10. 10.

    Meserve’s algebra text developed the number systems in an essentially equivalent manner, but with a different order and with different symbolism. After first defining the natural numbers he proceeded to the positive rational numbers and only then defined negative numbers, by “considering pairs [a – b] of nonnegative rational numbers as symbols” (Meserve 1953, p. 20). Fehr (1940) considers this treatment, but rejects it because “an unknown meaningless form (a – b) has been set equal to an unknown meaningless form -c” (p. 70). The UICSM treatment was identical in order and symbolism to Fehr’s treatment. Landau’s treatment was entirely distinct from both Fehr and Meserve (Landau 1960).

  11. 11.

    Other Uni High teachers of mathematics during the 1950s included David Page and Eugene Nichols (Rovnyak 2007).

  12. 12.

    Capitalization in original. Virginia Rovnyak received a PhD in mathematics from Yale in 1965.

  13. 13.

    Bezuszka’s highest degree in mathematics was a bachelor’s degree, but his education in mathematics was probably the equivalent of a master’s degree (Bezuszka 2002).

  14. 14.

    Kevin McCrimmon received a PhD in mathematics from Yale in 1965. The University of Illinois University High School graduated 37 students in 1957 (Uni Graduating Classes 1951–1960 2021). Running these names through the Mathematics Genealogy Project (2021) detected three PhDs in pure mathematics (including McCrimmon, and Rovnyak, noted earlier) and two PhDs in mathematical economics.

  15. 15.

    Italics in original.

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  1. Prince George’s Community College, Largo, MD, USA

    David Lindsay Roberts

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  1. KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Dirk De Bock

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Roberts, D.L. (2023). The Rise of the American New Math Movement: How National Security Anxiety and Mathematical Modernism Disrupted the School Curriculum. In: De Bock, D. (eds) Modern Mathematics. History of Mathematics Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11166-2_2

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