In *Folha*, Viana revisits the history of “modern mathematics”

Reproduction of Marcelo Viana’s column in Folha de S. Paulo

In the American TV series “Green Acres,” which aired in Brazil in the late 1960s under the title “O Fazendeiro do Asfalto,” Oliver Douglas is a successful lawyer in New York who leaves it all behind to become a farmer in the fictional, run-down town of Hooterville. His wife, Lisa, played by the glamorous Hungarian actress Eva Gabor, accompanies her husband, but makes no secret of how much she would prefer to continue living on New York’s Fifth Avenue. The show’s delightful comedic flow stems from the contrast between Oliver’s idyllic vision of country life and the reality of living in the backward town of Hooterville with its eccentric inhabitants.

But the series also explores various current issues, such as the advent of computers and the space race, from the perspective of the middle class of that era. I particularly remember the episode where Lisa tries to help her neighbor’s son with his math homework and is baffled: “Honey, I thought I’d learned everything just right in school, but I don’t think I understand any of this new math they’re talking about. It seems like all they do is draw diagrams on paper, and nobody cares about doing calculations anymore.”

That was my first encounter with what came to be known as “modern mathematics.” Years later, when I reached high school, modern mathematics was already being removed from the curriculum, and for me and many others, what remained was the memory of an experiment that hadn’t worked out. But the true story is more nuanced than that, and it’s important to recognize just how much the mathematics we teach in schools today owes to that experiment.

Modern mathematics was an educational reform initiative that gained momentum in the 1950s and 1960s, with the goal of bringing the mathematics taught in schools closer to that being developed by researchers in the field at universities. The initiative was strongly influenced by Nicolas Bourbaki, a group of prominent French mathematicians who, at that time, were reorganizing the entire logical framework of mathematics based on the fundamental ideas of set theory and other abstract concepts.

The proponents believed that the new perspective offered a more coherent and unified view of the discipline, would be better suited to developing students’ abstract reasoning, and, in general, would better prepare them to keep pace with advances in science and technology. In fact, in the United States, the movement gained momentum during the Cold War out of a concern to improve the scientific education of Americans in response to the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957.

As I mentioned here previously, the introduction of modern mathematics in Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s owed a great deal to the leadership of Professor Osvaldo Sangiorgi at the helm of the São Paulo Mathematics Education Study Group.

For many adults at the time, like Lisa, the new teachings seemed strange. The children seemed to spend their time drawing set diagrams and using ideas and symbols whose meaning they did not understand—and which seemed very far removed from real life.

Read it in full on Folha’s website.