“Should I teach them from the point of view of the history of science, from the applications? My theory is that the best way to teach is to have no philosophy, [it] is to be chaotic and [to] confuse it in the sense that you use every possible way of doing it. ...so as to catch this guy or that guy on different hooks as you go along, [so] that during the time when the fellow who's interested in history's being bored by the abstract mathematics... the fellow who likes the abstractions is being bored another time by the history—if you can do it so you don't bore them all, all the time, perhaps you're better off. ...I don't know how to answer the question of different kinds of minds with different interests... after many, many years of trying to teach and trying all kinds of different methods, I really don't know how to do it.”
“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
“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 t...”
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