Tools of American Mathematics Teaching, 1800-2000

摘要

Textbooks, slide rules, and the National Semiconductor Quiz Kid are tools of Utopia and novelties of hucksters, mechanical instructors of a space-age polity and torture devices of America's youth. These are only some of the material influences on the nation's mathematical heritage as described by Peggy Aldrich Kidwell, Amy Ackerberg-Hastings, and David Lindsay Rob-rnerts. By telling the history of mathematics as the history of things, the authors provide an account of learning not as a progressive march of logic, but rather as ever-shifting constraints and opportunities afforded by socio-technical change.