Science & Education 10: 391–408, 2001.

391
© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Can Mathematics Education and History of

Mathematics Coexist?

MICHAEL N. FRIED
The Center for Science and Technology Education, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, P.O. Box
653, Beer-Sheva, 84105, Israel

Abstract. Despite the wide interest in combining mathematics education and the history of mathem-
atics, there are grave and fundamental problems in this effort. The main difficulty is that while one
wants to see historical topics in the classroom or an historical approach in teaching, the commitment
to teach the modern mathematics and modern mathematical techniques necessary in the pure and
applied sciences forces one either to trivialize history or to distort it. In particular, this commitment
forces one to adopt a “Whiggish” approach to the history of mathematics. Two possible resolutions
of the difficulty are (1) “radical separation” – putting the history of mathematics on a separate track
from the ordinary course of instruction, and (2) “radical accommodation” – turning the study of
mathematics into the study of mathematical texts.

Key words: Mathematics education, history of mathematics, Whiggism, sedimentation, two-tiered

thinking, humanistic mathematics

1. Introduction

That the history of mathematics should have a place in the mathematics classroom
is not a new idea. Even when it was new, say in the 1960s and 1970s, it was not
completely unheard of – already at the beginning of the century, and before that,
educators considered the value of the history of mathematics for teaching (see,
for example, Barwell 1913). Today, incorporating history into the mathematics
curriculum is urged by established organizations such as the National Council
of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM 1989) and the Mathematical Association of
America, discussed by international study groups such as the International Study
Group on the Relationship between the History and Pedagogy of Mathematics
(ISGHPM), and is the subject of conferences, papers, and Internet-groups. But
despite all that has been written and said, in practice, little has been done in the
schools themselves. This invites a critical look at the whole project of combining
the history of mathematics and mathematics education. In particular, one should
consider the soundness of its basic assumption, namely, that it is truly possible to
combine history of mathematics and mathematics education. The main goal of this
paper is to show that, indeed, there is a difficulty in that assumption.
392 MICHAEL N. FRIED

The discussion will be divided into three parts. In the first, I shall survey some
common justifications for the importance of the history of mathematics in mathem-
atics education and some modes educators have suggested for introducing it into
the classroom. In the second part, I shall look at the dilemma bound to arise in
any historical approach to mathematics education because of one’s unavoidable
commitment to the teaching of modern mathematics and modern mathematical
techniques. In the final part, I shall consider two possible resolutions to the
dilemma.

2. History of Mathematics in Mathematics Education: Modes and

Justifications
There are many reasons educators are interested in the history of mathematics.
Fauvel (1991), for example, cites fifteen reasons – and, no doubt, if one combs
the literature, one can find even more. But, it is fair to say that these reasons can
be divided into three broad themes: (1) that the history of mathematics humanizes
mathematics, (2) that it makes mathematics more interesting, more understand-
able, and more approachable, (3) that it gives insight into concepts, problems, and
problem-solving. In the first theme one sees history of mathematics as encouraging
multicultural approaches, giving students historical role-models, connecting the
study of mathematics with human emotions and motivations (e.g., Swetz 1995;
Avital 1995; Brown 1993). The second, naturally the broadest of these broad
themes, includes claims that the history of mathematics adds variety to teaching,
decreases students’ fear of mathematics, gives some sense of the place of math-
ematics in society (e.g., Ness 1993; Rickey 1995). The last theme is somewhat
different when one speaks of the importance of the history of mathematics for
teachers and when one speaks of its importance for students. In the case of teachers,
one has here, for example, the “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny argument” in
which it is claimed that the learning of some subject in mathematics follows a
path parallel to the subject’s history (e.g., Fauvel 1991; Sfard 1995; Garner 1996;
Thomaidis 1993). In the case of students, this theme points to history providing
a context for problems and ideas, suggesting alternative approaches to problem-
solving, showing the relationships between ideas, definitions, and applications
(e.g., Katz 1993; Kleiner 1993; Avital 1995). Naturally these themes are more
expressions of emphasis than they are distinct categories, and, indeed, most writers
on the history of mathematics in education see all of them as relevant.
The various modes for introducing the history of mathematics in the school pro-
gram have, in general, two basic strategies. The first involves introducing historical
anecdotes, short biographies, isolated problems, and so on – this I call the strategy
of addition, since by it one does not alter a curriculum except by enlarging it. This
can be a very passive strategy such as when teachers show their students pictures
of mathematicians. The great historian of Science, George Sarton (1957, p. ix),
said that “The importance of portraits can hardly be exaggerated. A good portrait
MATHEMATICS EDUCATION AND HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS 393

of a man tells us more about him than the longest descriptions”. Still, most who
adopt a strategy of addition do add some description of the life and work of famous
mathematicians. Swetz (1995, p. 25) denies the utility of including this “. . . more
factual knowledge in an already crowded curriculum”. Swetz’s own program of
“using problems from the history of mathematics in classroom instruction”, how-
ever, is also an example of the strategy of addition. He says, “Historical problems
and problem solving, as a topic in itself, can be the focus of a lesson, but it is
probably more effective if such problems are broadly dispersed within classroom
drills and homework assignments. Teachers who like to specify a ‘problem of the
week’ will find that historical problems fit the task nicely” (Swetz 1995, p. 33).
These historical problems serve to motivate, illustrate, or enlighten classroom top-
ics, while the topics themselves are not necessarily taught in an historical way. For
instance, in studying the technique of “completing the square” for finding the roots
of quadratic equations, a teacher might use the usual non-historical explanation
and do usual non-historical exercises. But instead of leaving it at that, the teacher
enhances the discussion, as Swetz (1995, p. 28) puts it, by introducing Babylonian
problems in which some writers have thought the technique to have originated.
The second strategy actually changes the way material is presented, for ex-
ample, by using an historical development in one’s explanation of a technique
or idea or organizing subject matter according to an historical scheme. I call
this strategy the strategy of accommodation since by it one fits or accommodates
the curriculum to historical circumstances or to an historical model. This is the
strategy, for instance, in Katz’s (1995) “Napier’s Logarithms Adapted for Today’s
Classroom” where Katz suggests that an introduction to the logarithm following
Napier’s geometric-kinematic scheme brings out functional properties of the log-
arithm important for precalculus students. It is important to stress that what makes
Katz’s strategy one of accommodation is that he uses the historical development as
a guide in the actual teaching of the subject: presenting the logarithm as a function
having the property g(x) + g(y) = g(xy) for any positive real numbers x and y,
and only then showing how this relates to Napier’s understanding of the logarithm
would be an addition strategy. Katz also applies the strategy of accommodation
in a broader way in his “Using the History of Calculus to Teach Calculus” (Katz
1993), where he not only suggests using history to present individual subjects in a
course but also to determine the structure and flow of the course itself. Indeed, he
is careful to point out how this strategy differs from what I called the strategy of
addition. He writes (Katz 1993, p. 243): “By an historical approach to calculus, I
do not mean simply giving the historical background for each separate topic or
giving a biographical sketch of the developers of various ideas. I do mean the
organization of the topics in essentially their historical order of development as
well as the discussion of the historical motivations for the development of each of
these topics, both those within mathematics and those from other scientific fields”.
394 MICHAEL N. FRIED

3. A Dilemma in Historical Approaches to Mathematics Education

That there is no inherent difficulty in historical approaches to mathematics edu-

cation must naturally underlie any justification and any blend or variation of the
strategies outlined above: obviously, one must assume that combining history and
mathematics education is genuinely possible before asking whether it is good and
how it should be pursued. In fact, I believe such historical approaches present a
dilemma right from the start. But before discussing this dilemma, consider the
rather mundane problem of time.
Mathematics curricula in secondary schools rarely leave room for additional
subjects or for extended discussions on existing material. Teachers must complete
a great number of topics in a very short time; they suffer the pressure of a quota
system. It is not surprising, then, that teachers should resist introducing a program
of history of mathematics despite its virtues. Avital (1995, p. 7), sensitive to this
problem, says, “Teachers may ask ‘Where do I find the time to teach history?’ The
best answer is: ‘You do not need any extra time’. Just give an historical problem
directly related to the topic you are teaching; tell where it comes from; and send
the students to read up its history on their own”. Of course, Avital’s solution here
is no solution at all since he merely removes the problem of time from the teacher
and passes it on to the students. But, in general, an addition strategy can work
within a time constraint by replacing an ordinary classroom problem with one
referring to the same material but having an historical context. Indeed, this comes
through elsewhere in Avital’s 1995 paper, and it is certainly at the center of Swetz’s
approach (Swetz 1995). Programs involving an accommodation strategy, like those
of Katz discussed above, solve the problem of time in a different manner. Such
programs do not require that the teacher take on additional subjects but only teach
the old ones in a new way. In this case, therefore, the teacher is not forced to find
extra time for extra material in an already overloaded program, and students are
not forced to find extra time for extra homework.
However one solves the problem of time, though, it is plain that problem arises
because one has to fit the history of mathematics into a curriculum whose general
outline is fixed; no teacher can accept a curriculum that excludes, say, the solution
of quadratic equations. The problem of time, in this way, is related to another
issue, that of relevance. Clearly, the relevance of the history of mathematics to
the fixed core of the mathematics curriculum can be an argument in its favor. Thus,
Avital (1995, p. 7) writes: “History can follow the curriculum from topic to topic.
Some approaches to historical problems not only enrich instruction, but actually
show ways that are educationally better than the modern ones”. In other words, the
historical approach can work, in this view, since for every topic in the curriculum
one can find a relevant historical problem, idea, or figure. But the downside of
this continual measuring of relevance is that it turns the author of an historical
approach in mathematics into a kind of editor of history, accepting what is relevant
and throwing out what is not. Katz must recognize this almost unavoidable role,
MATHEMATICS EDUCATION AND HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS 395

for he writes (Katz 1993, p. 243), “Naturally, I cannot always stick precisely to the
historical record. Many seemingly good ideas led to dead ends or to methods that
are too difficult at this level”. Needless to say, these “dead ends” are just those parts
of the history of mathematics that have no continuation in modern mathematics,
that is, they are those parts having no relevance to what we have to teach.
With this discussion of relevancy, we approach what is indeed an inherent dif-
ficulty in the project of combining the history of mathematics and mathematics
education. It begins with the simple fact that we mathematics educators are com-
mitted to teaching modern mathematics, to teaching the kind of mathematics our
students will need in their later study of mathematics, science, or engineering. This
commitment must subordinate the attempt to introduce a program of history to the
needs of a modern mathematics curriculum; the history of mathematics becomes
not something studied but used. And one often sees the word “use” in the literature
on the subject. Thus, we have, “The Use of History of Mathematics in Teaching”,
“Using History in Mathematics Education”, “Using the History of Calculus to
Teach Calculus”, “Using Problems from the History of Mathematics in Classroom
Instruction”, “Improved Teaching of the Calculus Through the Use of Historical
Materials”, to name a few. Now, just because a body of knowledge is used does not
in itself prove it has been misused, and the one who uses it should not necessarily
be condemned. However, when history is used to justify, enhance, explain, and
encourage distinctly modern subjects and practices, it inevitably becomes what is
called “anachronical” (Kragh 1987) or “Whig” history (Butterfield 1931/1951).
This kind of historiography, if not downright reprehensible, is at least highly ques-
tionable in most history circles. And every historian, especially the historian of
mathematics, as we shall see, must, one way or another, contend with the problem
of “Whig” history.
So, what is “Whig” history? Its best description is still that of Herbert Butter-
field (1931/1951), who invented the notion. In the brief account which follows,
therefore, I shall largely follow Butterfield’s exposition.
In a Whig historiography the present is the measure of the past. Hence, what
one considers significant in history is precisely what leads to something deemed
significant today. For this reason, “It is considered legitimate, if not necessary, that
the historian should ‘intervene’ in the past with the knowledge that he possesses by
virtue of his placement later in time” (Kragh 1987, p. 89). Butterfield described the
Whig historian as a maker of “a gigantic optical illusion” (Butterfield 1931/1951, p.
29): the Whig historian produces what appears to be a clear and certain picture of
the past, but in fact what is produced is a distortion. For Butterfield, Whig history is
worse than bad history, it is hardly history at all. As he says, “The study of the past
with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in
history, starting with the simplest of them, the anachronism . . . And it is the essence
of what we mean by the word ‘unhistorical’ ” (Butterfield 1931/1951, pp. 30–31).
The point is that as far as the historian genuinely believes that history is real, he
believes that the world is always in flux, that it changes, that the past, therefore, was
396 MICHAEL N. FRIED

unlike the present. This is why Butterfield stresses that the historian has always to
begin with the difference between past and present, “. . . for the chief aim of the
historian is the elucidation of the unlikeness between past and present and his chief
function is to act in this way as the mediator between other generations and our
own. It is not for him to stress and magnify the similarities between one age and
another, and he is riding after a whole flock of misapprehensions if he goes to hunt
for the present in the past” (Butterfield 1931/1951, p. 10).
No doubt, one can follow a path from the present back to the past, but it has
a direction only from the point of view of the present; from the perspective of the
past, and that is the historical perspective, it is the zigzag path of a wanderer who
does not know exactly where he is going. This makes questions about the origins
of ideas and institutions somewhat dubious, and, in Butterfield’s view, hopelessly
Whiggish: “The consequences of his fundamental misconception are never more
apparent than in the whig historian’s quest for origins; for we are subject to a great
confusion if we turn this quest into a search for analogies, or if we attempt to go too
directly to look for the present in the past. The very form of question is a fault if we
ask, To whom do we owe our religious liberty? We may ask how this liberty arose,
but even then it takes all history to give us the answer. We are in error if we imagine
that we have found the origin of this liberty when we have merely discovered the
first man who talked about it” (Butterfield 1931/1951, pp. 42–43).
This point is especially pertinent in the historiography of mathematics. The
historian of mathematics is inundated with such questions as, Who discovered the
quadratic formula? or Who invented the function concept? How can one answer
questions like these? Take the second question, for example. One might credit
Oresme for the invention of the function concept because his graphical repres-
entation for the intensity of qualities resembles the graph of a function. One might
refer to Oresme’s work, as Boyer does, as “. . . an early suggestion of what we now
describe as the graphical representation of functions” (Boyer 1985, p. 290). Indeed,
it is easy for us to find the function concept in Oresme because we have a clear idea
of what we are looking for and how important it is. But by involving Oresme in our
own search for the function concept, we miss his own interest in the nature of
motion and change and we lose the Aristotelian context out of which this interest
grew (see Lindberg 1992, pp. 290–307). In effect, we take away Oresme’s thoughts
and make him think our own. This is a tendency that Youschkevitch, writing about
the development of functions, is well aware of, and careful to point out. He says,
“Generally speaking, studying mathematics of bygone ages, one often not only
estimates its importance for the further development of this science (which is ne-
cessary) but also, not infrequently, one impermissibly broadens the interpretation of
its ideas, linking them with modern, much more general, notions and conceptions.
And it really happens that, as Goethe’s Faust remarked to his pupil Wagner, the
historian equates the spirit of the times with its reflection in his own mind . . . ”
(Youschkevitch 1976, p. 43).
MATHEMATICS EDUCATION AND HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS 397

But perhaps the situation is different if one turns to the 18th century when the
word “function” and even the symbol “f (x)” begin to appear explicitly. Indeed,
one feels somewhat satisfied by Johann Bernoulli’s 1718 definition of a function
of a variable magnitude as “a quantity composed in any manner whatsoever of
this variable magnitude and of constants” (“On appelle Fonction d’une grandeur
variable une quantité composée de quelque manière que ce soit de cette grandeur
variable et de constantes”) (Bernoulli 1968, p. 241). So when in 1748 Euler defines
a function of a variable quantity as “an analytic expression [emphasis added] com-
posed in any way from this variable quantity and numbers or constant quantities”
(“Functio quantitatis variabilis est expressio analytica quomodocunque composita
ex illa quantitate variabili et numeris seu quantitatibus constantibus”) (Euler 1922,
p. 18), one feels that one has taken a step backwards. All of a sudden a function
has been restricted to being an analytic expression, indeed one analytic expres-
sion – no “arbitrary” functions, no split domains (Kleiner 1993). But perhaps one
has only misunderstood Bernoulli’s definition. In fact, Youschkevitch makes the
point that “. . . it is obvious that [Bernoulli] actually meant analytic expressions
of functions, this being in accord with the basic tendency in the development of
the infinitesimal analysis which, retaining and even strengthening its connections
with geometry, mechanics and physics, during the 18th century became a scientific
discipline more and more self-contained in its principles. All the initial concepts of
the calculus gradually lose their geometrical and mechanical shell, are formulated
arithmetically or algebraically, and begin to be apprehended as logically preceding
similar concepts of other exact sciences” (Youschkevitch 1976, p. 60). Euler’s work
advances this tendency in that he tries to formulate exactly what is meant by the
basic terms of the new analysis, in particular, what is meant by “composed in any
manner whatsoever” (see Youschkevitch 1976, p. 61). So, again, by assuming that
Euler and Bernoulli’s “function” is like our function we miss Euler and Bernoulli’s
grave concerns and see only how their ideas fall short of our own.
To gain an historically sensitive picture of Euler’s work, one ought to begin by
treating “constant quantity”, “variable quantity”, “function”, as if they are words
and phrases in a foreign language one does not know. With that in the background,
reading Euler’s Introductio in analysin infinitorum (1748) becomes an attempt to
understand what Euler meant by these “unfamiliar” phrases and why he found them
so important And, at that point, one begins truly to study the history of mathemat-
ics. Here, however, one also lands square in the dilemma facing the mathematics
educator. For a teacher can consider a program in the history of mathematics only
to the extent that it will increase students’ understanding and appreciation of con-
stants, variables, and functions as they are used in engineering, physics, and so
on, that is, in their modern sense. So, if one is a mathematics educator, one must
choose: either (1) remain true to one’s commitment to modern mathematics and
modern techniques and risk being Whiggish, i.e., unhistorical in one’s approach, or,
at best, trivializing history, or (2) take a genuinely historical approach to the history
398 MICHAEL N. FRIED

of mathematics and risk spending time on things irrelevant to the mathematics one
has to teach.
That mathematics teachers are committed to teaching modern mathematics and
modern mathematical techniques naturally makes their relationship to the history
of mathematics quite different from that of an historian of mathematics. Consider
the case of “geometric algebra”. This notion was invented by the Danish math-
ematician Hieronymus Georg Zeuthen to analyze and interpret ancient theories of
conic sections, particularly those of Apollonius of Perga (Zeuthen 1886). Zeuthen
saw Greek texts like the second book of Euclid’s Elements as algebraic texts in
geometric form. In this view, then, a proposition such as Euclid’s Elem. II.4, which
states that, “If a straight line be cut at random, the square on the whole is equal to
the squares on the segments and twice the rectangle contained by the segments”,
simply presents the algebraic identity, (a + b)2 = a 2 + b2 + 2ab, in geometric
language. For anyone who already knows algebra and knows its power, “geometric
algebra” can be liberating: with “geometric algebra”, one can replace “the rectangle
contained by AB and BE” (τò υ‘ πò των AB, BE περιεχóµενoν o’ρθoγώνιoν) by
“AB·BE” or “the square on AB” (τò α’ πò της AB τετράγωνoν) by “AB2 ”, and,
with that, one can proceed to rewrite a Greek mathematical text in the symbolism
of ordinary algebra, despite the fact that the Greek text has no such symbolism nor
implies any of the generality that is at the heart of algebra. Given the ease with
which “geometric algebra” allows one to discern modern mathematics in ancient
mathematics, it should come as no surprise that in the years following the pub-
lication of Zeuthen’s book, Die Lehre von den Kegelschnitten im Altertum (1886),
“geometric algebra” was embraced enthusiastically as the basis of much of Greek
mathematics. Indeed, Thomas Heath accepted it (see Heath 1926), Neugebauer
(1933) accepted it, and, following Neugebauer, van der Waerden (1963) accepted
it lock, stock, and barrel. Already in the 1930s, however, Jacob Klein questioned
the appropriateness of “geometric algebra” as a means to understand Greek math-
ematical thought (Klein 1968, pp. 63, 122). And in the mid 1970s, the issue erupted
into controversy (see Fauvel and Grey 1987, pp. 140–147) with the publication of
Sabetai Unguru’s “On the Need to Rewrite the History of Greek Mathematics”
(Unguru 1975), in which Unguru trenchantly criticized the notion of “geometric
algebra”, both on grounds of history and historiography. Today, most historians of
Greek mathematics find “geometric algebra” neither true nor useful; there are some
“agnostics”, to use Grattan-Guinness’ term (Grattan-Guinness 1996), but there is
hardly a serious historian who is still a “true believer”.
Disagreement among students of history can be very great, as it was in the “geo-
metric algebra” dispute. Nevertheless, the end is always the same: to understand the
thought of the past. This is the historian’s commitment, and it means that whether
one is a mathematician like van der Waerden or an historian of mathematics like
Unguru the validity of one’s position on an historical question must be measured
against the particular historical record and the general norms of historical practice.
So, the historian who still believes in “geometric algebra” has to acknowledge
MATHEMATICS EDUCATION AND HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS 399

historical evidence against it and face objections to its interpretive methodology.

However, the mathematics educator, earnest though he may be in the attempt to
introduce history into the classroom, is not bound by the historian’s commitment.
Thus, despite the disavowal of “geometric algebra” among historians of Greek
mathematics, one finds the author of a 1996 article on using history in teaching high
school mathematics justifying her point that “History helps the understanding of
topics in the [mathematics] curriculum” by the following example (Kooper 1996):

“P ROBLEM”:
“Complete the square: x 2 + 6x”
“S OLUTION”:
“The Greeks of the fourth century B.C.E. represented numbers by line seg-
ments. Products of two numbers were represented by means of the area of
rectangles. x 2 is the area of a square whose side is x, and 6x is the area of a
rectangle whose dimensions are 6 and x . . . ”

and so on. Now, had the author said that, in the 16th century, Girolamo Cardano
used such geometric arguments to justify his algebraic techniques (for example,
in his 1545 Ars Magna, chap. V) her account would certainly have been better
history. But being better history is not the point. She is committed to teaching the
technique of “completing the square”, and to encouraging her students to learn it.
Had she entered into a discussion of the Greek theory of “application of areas”
(παραβoλὴ τν χωρίων) with all its related philosophical concerns, she would
probably only confuse her students (pace Steven I. Brown) and would certainly not
be closer to fulfilling her goals in teaching school algebra. She must not lose sight
of the modern ideas and techniques she has to teach, and, therefore, “Whiggism”
becomes not a tendency to be discussed, but a near prerequisite to her historical
approach.

4. Directions Towards Resolving the Difficulty

One might ask should the mathematics teacher be concerned whether or not his
historical approach is Whiggish, that is, is there any real urgency to the choice:
remain true to one’s commitment to modern mathematics and modern techniques
and risk being Whiggish or take a genuinely historical approach to the history
of mathematics and risk spending time on things irrelevant to the accepted math-
ematics curriculum. Let me put the question a little more concretely. In a review
of Bourbaki’s 1960 Eléments d’Histoire des Mathématiques, the mathematician
Saunders Mac Lane wrote “These elements of history are just . . . former mathem-
atics as it seems now to Bourbaki, and not as it seemed to its practitioners then.
In the terminology of historiography, it is ‘Whig history’. But for the mathem-
atician, the various chapters are full of interesting insights” (in Corry 1989, p.
435). To this, Corry remarks, “Mathematicians will certainly endorse Bourbaki’s
400 MICHAEL N. FRIED

historiographical approach because of the interesting mathematical insights it af-

fords, even when it is done at the expense of a faithful historical interpretation”
(Corry 1989, p. 435). So, ought the mathematics educator, like the mathematician
in this case, be willing to sacrifice faithful historical interpretation for the sake
of drawing students more deeply into the subjects they are supposed to learn
and providing them, perhaps, with some mathematical insights? If speaking about
“geometric algebra” helps students understand “completing the square” better or
makes learning it less distasteful or creates an appetite for learning more algeb-
raic techniques, Why not? Indeed, telling students about “geometric Algebra”, in
this light, seems consistent with two of the justifications for introducing history
of mathematics in the classroom mentioned in the first section, namely, that the
history of mathematics makes mathematics more interesting, more understand-
able, and more approachable, and that it gives insight into concepts, problems,
and problem-solving.
The problem with this line of thinking is that if making mathematics interesting
and gaining mathematical insights supersedes searching for historical truth, one
can reasonably ask: Why take an historical approach in the first place? Why not
present “geometric algebra” without calling it Greek? Does calling it Greek make
it more apt to provide the insights it is supposed to provide? Or conversely, why
not take a problem lending itself to an interesting solution, say, by the calculus,
and tell an entertaining story about it that might make it more interesting? The
answer comes from the third justification for introducing history into the mathem-
atics classroom, namely, that the history of mathematics humanizes mathematics.
In order to humanize mathematics, clearly the mathematics must be attached to real
human beings – real human doing, making, and thinking – and it must be attached
to real human circumstances, to social and intellectual climates.
The inquiry into the richness and variety of human thought, its influence and its
influences is at the heart of intellectual history, of which the history of mathematics
is a part. The idiosyncrasy of a mathematician’s thought or of the thought of the
mathematician’s time is, accordingly, what the historian of mathematics is after
(see Elton 1969, p. 24). Thus, for example, an historian studying Apollonius of
Perga is less interested in determining whether or not Apollonius in fact discovered
the main properties of the conic sections, than in recovering the peculiar character
of Apollonius’s view of conic sections. Why does Apollonius wait until the middle
of Book I of the Conica to define the parabola, hyperbola, and ellipse when he
might have defined them right at the start of the book? Why does he seem uneasy as
to whether the opposite sections are two hyperbolas or whether the hyperbola is one
curve with two branches (see Unguru and Fried, 1996; Fried 1998)? What do these
things say about Apollonius and about what post-Euclidean Greek mathematics
was like?
Looking at a mathematical text with an eye to what makes it peculiarly Apol-
lonian or peculiarly Greek is precisely approaching mathematics historically. This
is why the historian is particularly interested in the “dead ends” mathematicians
MATHEMATICS EDUCATION AND HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS 401

come to and the mistakes they make, for these are the kinds of things that reveal
the peculiarity of the person’s thought; these are the things that reveal the human
character of doing mathematics. So, while one might succeed in making mathem-
atics interesting, understandable, and approachable, or in providing insights into
concepts, problems, and problem-solving without history or with an “unhistorical”
history, humanizing mathematics with history requires that history be taken quite
seriously, not as a mere tool, but as something studied earnestly.
If one is willing to widen the commitment in mathematics teaching to include
humanizing mathematics, then a certain resolution of the difficulty in combining
history and mathematics education suggests itself. From the discussion above,
to humanize mathematics one must look at it through the eyes and works of its
practitioners, with all their idiosyncrasies; one must, as far as possible, read their
texts as they wrote them. Teaching mathematics with this in mind means treating
mathematics as a dialogue in which, as in any dialogue, to understand what is
going on one cannot ignore the first speaker for the sake of the last. Thus, the study
of mathematics becomes the study of mathematical texts, just as literature is the
study of great works of prose and poetry. This kind of approach may be termed an
approach of “radical accommodation”, because, in a sense, it takes the strategy of
accommodation right to the foundation of how one conceives the teaching of math-
ematics. Strangely enough, “radical accommodation” also forces one to reconsider
how one conceives an historical text; for, to continue the analogy with literature,
while one learns something about Elizabethan culture by reading Shakespeare, the
main reason one reads Shakespeare’s works is that they are great in their own right.
The next two paragraphs will make this last point clearer.
There is no doubt that “radical accommodation” humanizes mathematics, even
profoundly so. The worrying question, however, is whether such an approach
equally satisfies the other component of the mathematics teacher’s commitment,
namely, that students learn to do the mathematics of science and engineering. This
requires some qualification. In particular, what does it mean, “to do the math-
ematics of science and engineering”? This, I believe, has never meant that our
mathematics classes should produce competent scientists and engineers, but rather
that our instruction prepare students to be competent scientists and engineers by
teaching them to use mathematics with some understanding of what they are do-
ing. And, naturally, for those students destined to be a mathematicians, we would
want them also to understand something of what mathematics itself is about. It
is doubtful this can be achieved by directing attention always towards mathemat-
ical techniques, keeping discussion as to what lies behind these techniques at the
minimum required to explain their use.
Beyond mastering elementary arithmetic and algebra, understanding what they
are doing when they do mathematics demands that students become somewhat
more reflective about mathematics; studying functions on the real line, for example,
should suggest, as it did to the mathematician Richard Dedekind (1901, pp. 1–2),
that we must clarify what we mean by numbers so that numbers can represent
402 MICHAEL N. FRIED

continuous entities. Indeed, when one uses a word like “number” one ought to be
aware that it hides a history of meanings, and that without such awareness one’s un-
derstanding of the word is incomplete. This is especially, if not primarily, true of the
“technical” terms one uses in science and mathematics: “function”, “continuity”,
“number”, and so on. On this issue, Jacob Klein has said,
The passing on of sciences, arts, and skills, especially of intellectual ones,
cannot quite avoid the danger of blurring the original understanding on which
those disciplines are based. The terms which embody that understanding, the
indispensable terms of the art, of the τέχνη [techne] in question, the ’tech-
nical’ terms, acquire gradually a life of their own, severed from the original
insights. In the process of perpetuating the art those insights tend to approach
the status of sediments, that is, of something understood derivatively and in a
matter-of-course fashion. The technical terms begin to form a technical jargon
spreading a thick veil over the primordial sources. (Klein 1965, p. 2)
Klein is very clear that to avoid this process of sedimentation, a notion he bor-
rowed from Husserl, one must pursue a course based on “the great documents of
human seeing, hearing, imagining, and understanding” (p. 3). So, in the study of
mathematical texts, one is not only engaged in solving problems and developing
ideas with a great mathematician, and therefore becoming deeply acquainted with
the human activity of mathematical work, but one is also engaged in a kind of
reflective thinking or inquiry that ultimately is of the highest importance for one
who deals with technical scientific and mathematical work.
At this point, one might wonder whether countering sedimentation and nur-
turing reflection truly requires original sources; perhaps a well-written textbook
would serve as well; perhaps the push to use original sources represents only the
purist’s desire for authenticity. The answer to these doubts is in the very different
character original texts have from textbooks. “By a textbook, as opposed to a text”,
says Eva T. H. Brann,
I mean manuals of prepared, convenient teaching material written in con-
ventional technical language. Textbooks, then, are opposed to works that are
original in both senses of the term, in being the discoveries of reflection of
the writer himself, and in taking a study to its intellectual origins, using the
original language of discovery. In sum, textbooks follow primarily a scheme
of presentation; texts convey the order of inquiry. (Brann 1979, p. 100)
So, textbooks and texts are different precisely because the latter are original, where
being original has not to do with being old but with the immediacy of the author’s
engagement with his subject. Because of this difference, readers of textbooks and
texts will be led in different directions. For when a book merely sets out accepted
knowledge, as a textbook must do almost by definition, it must essentially be closed
to inquiry. This is so even when such a book asks questions about the material it
contains, for the intention of such questions is only to clarify what is finally to
be accepted. For inquiry to arise, what one faces must be, in a sense, conditional,
MATHEMATICS EDUCATION AND HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS 403

open, uncertain; one must be in the position of asking not so much whether what
one is reading is clear and understood (as important as that may be), but whether
it is true. This is the position of a thinker in an original encounter with his subject,
and, to the extent that the author is a great one, that is, is wholly engaged in the
kind of inquiry such an original encounter requires, the reader is drawn into the
inquiry and invited to search for the “unsedimented” meaning of every word.
Suppose now one is not willing to widen the commitment in mathematics teach-
ing and to put humanizing mathematics on an equal footing with training students
in the techniques and methods of modern mathematics. Suppose, while caring
about history and the reflective approach to mathematics that it may engender in the
student, one maintains that pragmatic concerns must always guide what a mathem-
atics teacher teaches, in other words, that the mathematics teacher must look at his
students as future scientists and engineers who will need to use mathematical meth-
ods and techniques correctly, easily, and innovatively. Under this circumstance, one
obviously cannot accept a resolution by radical accommodation. On the contrary,
to fulfill this pragmatic commitment and also have students engage in a meaningful
study of the history of mathematics, one must put the history of mathematics on
a different track from the regular course of study. Since by this one is adding an
entire new curriculum to the unchanged standard curriculum, one might term this
approach to resolving the problem of combining mathematics education and the
history of mathematics, “radical addition”, or, better, “radical separation”.
Radical separation allows the mathematics teacher to develop students’ facility
with modern mathematical techniques, to explore the variety of problems to which
they can apply a given method or the variety of methods with which they can attack
a given problem, to refine or extend concepts and see what kinds of objects can
come into their range. These kinds of things can go quite far: besides becoming
at ease with some powerful mathematical tools, the student can come to feel the
excitement and surprise in finding unusual or simple solutions to seemingly in-
tractable problems or in discovering how techniques may be used in unusual ways.
In the other track, the teacher can look closely at original mathematical texts, ask
questions about the author and the kind of activity he is engaged in, search for the
hidden assumptions behind the terms the author uses, try and uncover the author’s
understanding of the object he studies and how his understanding may differ from
ours. The teacher in this track will have the freedom to read also philosophical
works that further reflection on the foundations of the mathematical texts and at
the same time give the students a sense of the author’s intellectual environment.
On the face of it, then, the approach of radical separation satisfies everyone. Yet,
one wonders whether it can truly be called a resolution; is it not a rejection of any
resolution? In the one track one has a pragmatic approach in which understanding
mathematics is tantamount to understanding its present use, and this means that the
present use of mathematics is, to this extent, an absolute. For the historian teaching
in the other track, present mathematics is by no means an absolute, it has a history;
its present use and present users have idiosyncrasies, just as its use and users in the
404 MICHAEL N. FRIED

past had and will have in the future; its ends, its goals, even the meanings of its
basic terms are constantly in flux. For the sake of argument, suppose that a single
mathematics teacher is required to teach in both tracks: will the original dilemma
in combining the teaching of mathematics teaching and history of mathematics
be resolved for him? Will it be resolved for the student required to study in both
tracks?
The problem may be related to a parallel issue in the philosophy of science
discussed by Yehuda Elkana, namely, the disparity between philosophical realism
and historical relativism (Elkana 1978). The realist speaks of facts and things ob-
jectively true, whereas the relativist speaks of context and cultural dependency.
Elkana says, “. . . the two positions (realism and relativism) are not inconsistent.
This polarization is not only unnecessary but dangerously misleading, and the
solution to the apparent inconsistency is simply to hold them both simultaneously.
This is what I mean by two-tier-thinking . . . .” (Elkana 1978, p. 313) On the one
hand, one recognizes that within a given conceptual framework there is no doubt
as to what is true and false and as to what is objective knowledge; this is the first
tier. On the other hand, one also recognizes that such a conceptual framework must
in one way or another be chosen, and the choice based on what Elkana refers to as
socially determined images of knowledge (Elkana 1978, p. 315; 1981, pp. 13–21);
this is the second tier.
With Elkana’s idea of two-tier thinking in mind, one could say to the student
studying in both tracks that “mathematics” has complementary meanings, and
that truly understanding “mathematics” means confronting seemingly inconsistent
views of it. Elkana’s thesis is tempting because it allows the resolution by radical
separation to be a resolution not merely because it “satisfies everyone”, which, of
course, really satisfies no one, but because it asserts that understanding mathem-
atics may, as with science, be a matter of thinking on two tracks simultaneously,
of continually keeping in mind two sides of one coin, as it were. Unfortunately,
however, this thesis is also highly problematic. Indeed, later in his 1978 paper (p.
317), Elkana himself retreats to a position in which relativism becomes a matter of
epistemology and realism a matter of psychology. Such a retreat vitiates the entire
project since, by it, realism and relativism become compatible merely by never
having to meet! As Gideon Freudenthal puts it, “As a philosophical thesis, two-tier
thinking would fail a limine because there is no problem to solve” (Freudenthal
1996, p. 152). But while Elkana’s view does not, therefore, resolve the difficulty
in radical separation, it does sharpen the question. After students have learned in
the history track that mathematics was truly different in the different periods of
its development, that it had different motivations, different means, and different
understandings of its basic objects, can we really expect that they will sanguinely
go to their class in the regular mathematics track and allow themselves to believe,
for forty minutes or so, that now they are doing something timeless and absolute?
That would demand a rather strange psychology!
MATHEMATICS EDUCATION AND HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS 405

The answer to the difficulty is that the true terms of the separation have to do not
with what is absolute, but, simply, with what is powerful. The modern techniques
and approaches taught in the regular mathematics track are taught there because
they provide the most powerful means to solve problems of interest and of import-
ance in the modern world; there is no reason to believe, moreover, that the same
techniques and approaches will always have this status, as there is no reason to
believe that the same problems will always be deemed the most interesting and the
most important. Seeing modern mathematics not as an absolute in any way but as
one kind of mathematics that happens to be very powerful makes the perspective
of the mathematics track consistent with that of the history track. But it also goes
far to explain what importance the history track has for the mathematics track. For
students coming from their class in the history track come knowing that human
beings have thought differently in the past, and, by implication, are likely to think
differently in the future as well. Therefore, they come to their class in the regular
mathematics track with a sense that they are engaged in a genuinely creative en-
terprise. Indeed, to call any field creative presupposes that it can accommodate a
wide variety of possibilities. This, incidentally, is what is so deeply wrong about
Whiggism, not only for historians but also for mathematics educators: a Whiggist
conception of mathematics allows only one kind of mathematics, modern math-
ematics, and, therefore, presents mathematics as a creative effort only up to the
present!
As stated in the introduction, the main purpose of this paper was point out a
difficulty in the effort to combine history of mathematics and mathematics educa-
tion. That difficulty, developed in the second section, was that the commitment to
teaching modern mathematics and modern mathematical techniques is at odds with
the historian’s commitment to shun anachronism, to see mathematics as something
in flux, and, therefore, to understand past mathematics as something more than an
older version of present mathematics. The resolutions by “radical accommodation”
and “radical separation” given in this last section were not meant to provide prac-
tical solutions but to show, in light of the difficulty, what such solutions would have
to be. Nevertheless, there are actual programs that are in line with these resolutions.
“Radical Separation” is not hard to implement in teacher training and is almost
natural where the history of mathematics is taught as an in-service course; this is
because teachers presumably have been taught the fundamentals of the standard
curriculum apart from the history course and are not necessarily encouraged to
incorporate the history directly into their teaching. Arcavi, Bruckheimer, and Ben-
Zvi’s in-service course on negative numbers (see Arcavi et al. 1982) is a good
example of what can be done, both in its use of primary materials and in its sens-
itivity to historiographical issues. “Radical accommodation” can be seen in the
“great books program” at St. John’s College (Annapolis, Maryland and Santa Fe,
New Mexico). During their four years at St. John’s, students are required to study in
a “mathematics tutorial” where they work through original texts and demonstrate
propositions of Euclid, Apollonius, Descartes, Newton, and Lobachevski among
406 MICHAEL N. FRIED

others. The job of the “tutor” is not to interpret the text, but to ask the students
questions about it and to sharpen the students’ own questions; both the tutor and
students recognize the text itself as the final authority.
Both resolutions above are called “radical” because they go to the very found-
ations of how one thinks of mathematics, the teaching of mathematics, and, for
that matter, the teaching of the history of mathematics. In this, it strengthens an
emerging view of mathematics as a humanistic subject, a subject that “. . . carries
with it an awareness of and a sensitivity to those things mathematics shares with
the humanities such as literature, art, and music” (White 1993, p. vii). Indeed, like
literature, art, and music, mathematics is an expression of that vision and invent-
iveness so much part of the human spirit. The study of the history of mathematics
is an effort to grasp this facet of human creativity. Thus, my looking critically at
attempts to introduce the history of mathematics in mathematics education should
not be interpreted as opposing such attempts. On the contrary, this criticism comes
precisely because I am in agreement with Tymoczko who says, “Pure mathematics
is ultimately humanistic mathematics, one of the humanities, because it is an intel-
lectual discipline with a human perspective and a history that matters” (Tymoczko
1993, p. 11).

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