“The author holds that our school curricula, by stripping mathematics of its cultural content and leaving a bare skeleton of technicalities, have repelled many a fine mind. It is the aim of this book to restore this cultural content and present the evolution of number as the profoundly human story which it is. ...the historical method has been freely used to bring out the rôle intuition has played in the evolution of mathematical concepts. And so the story of number is here unfolded as a historical pageant of ideas, linked with the men who created those ideas and with the epochs which produced the men.”
“Because of white racism's ability to bludgeon us into believing that we are inferior beings and therefore incapable of learning math and the sciences, we must spend a significant amount of our learnin...”
Mathematics education
“By the beginning of the seventeenth century we may say that the fundamental principles of arithmetic, algebra, theory of equations, and trigonometry had been laid down, and the outlines of the subject...”
Mathematics education
“All the modern higher mathematics is based on a calculus of operations, on laws of thought. All mathematics, from the first, was so in reality; but the evolvers of the modern higher calculus have know...”
Mathematics education
“Although there is no study which presents so simple a beginning as that of geometry, there is none in which difficulties grow more rapidly as we proceed, and what may appear at first rather paradoxica...”
Mathematics education
“I have tried to say to students of mathematics that they should read the classics and beware of secondary sources. This is a point which Eric Temple Bell makes repeatedly... in ... that the men of who...”
Mathematics education