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Why study the history of

mathematics?
a
Victor Byers
a
Department of Mathematics , Concordia University ,
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Published online: 19 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Victor Byers (1982) Why study the history of mathematics?, International
Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology, 13:1, 59-66, DOI:
10.1080/0020739820130109

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 INT. J. MATH. EDUC. SCI. TECHNOL., 1982, VOL. 13, NO. 1, 59-66

Why study the history of mathematics?

by VICTOR BYERS
Department of Mathematics, Concordia University,
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

(Received 18 February 1981)

This paper advances the proposition that there is need to rethink the function
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of history in mathematics education. The 'genetic principle' and other ways in

which the history of mathematics may be useful to teachers are examined; it is
found that most of these are of limited value in the school situation. The claim is
made that, in education, the main reason for studying the history of mathematics
is to throw some light on the nature of the discipline. It is further claimed that a
key role is played in this connection by the distinction and the interaction between
the content and the form of mathematics.

1. Introduction
Apparently there exists universal agreement that the history and the teaching of
mathematics are somehow related. This agreement includes the understanding that
prospective teachers of mathematicsexcept those expected to teach at the
university levelshould take courses in the history of mathematics.
"Recommendations for the inclusion of some study of history in teacher-training
programs are to be found in many studies and committee reports in many countries"
[1]. In fact, it is the author's impression that teachers and prospective teachers
constitute the bulk of the students taking introductory courses in the history of
mathematics. But the agreement breaks down when it comes to the question of what
such courses should contain. There is even less agreement on what teachers should
do with the history they have learned.

2. The genetic principle

At the turn of the century the rationale for demanding that teachers study the
history of mathematics was provided by the 'genetic principle' advanced by such
outstanding mathematicians as Felix Klein and Henri Poincare. We have discussed
this principle elsewhere [2]. It came to education from biologyvia Haeckel's
"fundamental biogenetic law: Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny" [3]. The principle
may be stated as follows: effective learning requires that each learner retrace the main
steps in the historical evolution of the subject under study.
With respect to the planning of mathematical instruction 'in the large' the genetic
principle has proved to be singularly effective. Thus, in 1923 the Mathematical
Association (Great Britain) issued a report which divided the teaching of geometry
into practical, deductive, and systematizing stages. Evidently these 'stages' were
suggested by the contrasts between pre-Hellenic and Greek mathematics on the one
hand, and between the 18th century calculus and the 19th century analysis on the
other [4].
However it is the order of instruction 'in the small' that is a teacher's primary
concern. Interpreted in this sense, the genetic principle can be easily disproved. In
0020-739x/82/1301 0059 $03.00 1982 Taylor & Francis Ltd
 60 V. Byers

fact, no one has ever suggested that a child should be kept away from the concept of
zero until he has completed the study of Greek geometry in which this concept does
not appear.
Thus the genetic principle cannot be taken literally. Moreover, it is hard to
visualize a mechanism which would account for a correspondence between the
cognitive process of attainment of mathematical concepts and their evolution as
cultural products.
It was possibly for these reasons that Polya has formulated the genetic principle
in a weak as well as a strong form and sounded a warning: "The genetic principle is a
guide to, not a substitute for, judgement" [3]. The weaker form of the principle may
be paraphrased to assert that a child's ability to acquire mathematical knowledge is
likely to be enhanced if its presentation is examined in the light of historical
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acquisition of such knowledge.

Although it does not do justice to the original principle, in my opinion such an
assertion is eminently sensible. The ordering of instructional material and effective
teaching of a mathematical topic may well require an examination of the history of
relevant mathematical ideas. As a case in point, such an examination might have kept
out of the schools the sterile ordered-pair definition of function [5].
The current attitudes to the genetic principle are somewhat ambivalent. On the
one hand, Haeckel's law has been invoked as recently as 1973 by the mathematician
Rene Thorn [6]. On the other, the genetic principle has been described as either
utterly absurd or practically useless unless it is taken to refer to motivation [7]. It has
also been suggested that, for all its plausibility, this principle is not independent of
other factors which affect the ordering of instructional material because its use tends
to present mathematical ideas in the order of increasing abstractness or of decreasing
familiarity [8]. Grattan-Guinness adopts a different approach. He expresses the
opinion that "at earlier stages, and especially in primary education, history is pretty
useless"; but he goes to some pains in an effort to convince university professors to
use the history of mathematics in their courses [9].
Grattan-Guinness distinguishes between epistemological, historical, and heuris-
tic presentations of a theory in an area of knowledge. The reader should consult his
paper for definitions of these terms. For our purposes it is sufficient to note that the
order of an epistemological presentation is "approximately the reverse of the
historical, since . . . it proceeds through a sequence of results that were discovered in
chronologically reverse order". Evidently an epistemological presentation teaches
mathematics in what we have called the logical or mathematical order [2]. Grattan-
Guinness emphasizes that it is the heuristic presentation that is relevant to
educational methodology; he adds that "to be successful it must surely imitate history
more than epistemology" [9],
We would add that the choice of the historical order as the optimal order of
instruction is notor should not bea matter of pre-set methodology, but a multi-
factor educational decision [2]. Needless to say, to make such decisions intelligently
it is necessary to know some history. But it can no longer be said that there exists a
direct route from the history of mathematics to its teaching.

3. The uses of history

In contrast to Grattan-Guinness, Jones views the history of mathematics as a
teaching tool which can help the teacher to achieve the elusive objective of teaching
for meaning and understanding [1]. The partial eclipse of the genetic principle has
 Why study the history of mathematics? 61

brought with it the need to list a number of reasons why a teacher should study the
history of mathematics. Indeed Jones classifies the 'whys' to be answered by
studying and teaching history into chronological, logical (motivational), and
pedagogical whys. The first type of why goes all the way from answering such
questions as "why there are sixty minutes in a degree or an hour" to "triggering]
discussions about the necessity and arbitrariness of definitions and of undefined
terms" [1].
On the other hand Grabiner, like Grattan-Guinness, focuses on the use of
history in university mathematics. She discusses the "value of the history of
mathematics ...for the mathematicianin teaching and understanding mathe-
matics" [10]. Though her approach is less detailed than Jones's approach she, too,
lists three ways in which a historical background can help teach mathematics. These
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are: recognizing the inherent difficulty of certain mathematical concepts, providing

motivation linked to a sense of development, and seeing the relationship between
mathematics and the rest of human thought. Is this list applicable to a teacher of
mathematics who is not a mathematician?
Grabiner's first point regarding the difficulty of concepts "which took hundreds
of years to develop" is a special case of the genetic principle. Although this
specialization of the principle has been used by Morris Kline as an argument against
the 'new math', it appears to be more relevant to the work of a university professor
than to that of an elementary teacher. Notwithstanding student difficulties the latter
has to teach decimal place-value notation in grade 1, even though it took
mathematicians a thousand years to accept it.
Regarding her last point Grabiner writes:

To see past mathematics in its historical context helps to see present

mathematics in its philosophical, scientific, and social context, and to have a
better understanding of the place of mathematics in the world [10].

It is of course desirable that a mathematics teacher be aware of the connections

between mathematics and other subjects on the school curriculum. It would also
help if he could show his students that, far from being applied ready-made to other
branches of knowledge, mathematics does not develop independently of social need
and of general culture. Nevertheless the impact described in the last quotation is not
likely to be achieved without a deeper insight into history than mathematics teachers
normally acquire.
Let us consider motivation. It is usually assumed that a teacher will use history
for motivational purposes and he is expected to learn enough of it to be able to do so.
There is no question that anecdotal and biographical material enlivens classroom
teaching. It also humanizes and 'de-mystifies' mathematics. To the extent that it
shows that mathematics as we know it is a product of hard work, it tends to relieve
some of the awe in which the subject is held by many students.
However this is not the sense in which Grabiner uses the word 'motivation'. She
has in mind the motivational effect of knowing the origin of problems, concepts and
proofs. Every good student has wondered occasionally how some of Euclid's proofs
originated, and identified himself with the great geometer in an attempt to find the
answer. A student who enters into the spirit of a mathematical epoch can 're-live' its
discoveries and substitute understanding for the all-too-common memorization of
definitions and proofs.
 62 V. Byers

It goes without saying that a school child or an adolescent cannot be expected to

immerse himself in the intellectual climate which produced a mathematical
discovery. Instead of assessing past knowledge and ignorance he would have to use
his imagination. It is presumably the task of the teacher to provide material which
would stimulate and direct his pupils' imagination. Ideally this material should
reconstruct the thought processes of individual mathematicians against the
background of the mathematical epoch during which they lived. However, the
provision of such material is by no means an easy task.
Perhaps this is why Grattan-Guinness suggests that the teacher use "history-
satire" or imitation of history rather than history as such. But successful imitation
presupposes knowledge and profound knowledge at that. Whatever it is called, such
a use of history brings us face to face with motivational problems of the teacher.
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4. History and the teacher

The teacher who tries to simulate for his pupils the mathematical thinking of long
ago is confronted with four types of difficulty. The first is the sparseness of pertinent
historical knowledge. It is probably harder to write a good history of school
mathematics than, say, of Babylonian mathematics. But even when the mathematical
record is fairly complete and accessible, its form causes a second difficulty. For
although mathematical discovery normally involves non-logical processes, all
reference to these is usually expunged when mathematical results are prepared for
publication. Thus the reconstruction of the process of thought underlying a
particular discovery is a formidable undertaking even for a professional historian.
The third difficulty is a lack of suitable teaching models. Grattan-Guinness has
pointed out that the historical approach to a university course in mathematics would
make greater demands on students than courses presented in the usual fashion. The
student would be "confronted with original problems, he will have to spend hours
trying to reconstruct the situation from unfamiliar ideas" [9]. It is doubtful whether
a teacher or a prospective teacher would take such a courseassuming one were
available.
The fourth difficulty arises out of the teacher's own training in mathematics. The
teaching mathematician is unlikely to treat mathematical correctness as a time-
dependent variable. Hence the student is trained to think ahistorically [11].
According to Lakatos it is formalism that divorces mathematics from its history [12].
But then it is well known that the formalist approach was the dominant approach to
mathematics during the first half of the 20th century. The formalist wave actually
reached its crest in the 1950sthe time when many of the present-day teachers and
teachers of teachers received their undergraduate training.
It seems reasonable to conclude that under the circumstances non-trivial direct
use of history in the classroom is out of reach for most teachers. Thus if the history of
mathematics is to aid the understanding of mathematics, it must furnish the teacher
with the sort of understanding of the subject which is a precondition for good
teaching.
5. The unity of mathematics
What kind of a picture of mathematics should the teacher get out of a systematic
study of its history? If, as Grabiner suggests, it is important for the mathematician
and the student to have a unified view of mathematics, then such a view is even more
important for the teacher. It is important for the teacher to see interrelationships
between topics under study and between the disparate branches of mathematics.
 Why study the history of mathematics? 63

During the first half of this century mathematicians were looking for an approach
that would unify mathematics. Mathematics educators, for their part, were in search
of 'unifying principles' that would lend coherence to school mathematics.
Professional mathematicians achieved a better understanding of their discipline
through the reconstruction of various branches of mathematics on set-theoretic
foundations. As a result, such leading mathematicians as Bourbaki entertained the
hope "to see mathematical structures arise naturally from a hierarchy of
sets . . . " [ 1 3 ] . Under the circumstances, it is scarcely surprising that sets became the
'unifying principle' of the 'new mathematics'. Indeed in educational practice the
hope became a 'fact'. Thus Papy declared:
Any teacher of mathematics has to start by recognizing one fundamental
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fact: The mathematics of today has regained its unity in the universality of the
set [14].
Ten years later no competent mathematician would advance such a claim.
Moreover, regardless of the value of set theory in systematizing higher mathematics,
the effect on school mathematics of the study of 'set concepts and terminology' has
been rather disappointing. The point is, however, that the unity of mathematics has
not been demonstrated by set theory, by the concept of abstract structure, or by any
other means. If anything, the reverse is the case:
The axiomatic method, for a time considered the answer to all problems
about foundations, has revealed its Achilles heel in the logic and set theory that
it presumes. Stripped to its essentials, it is seen to be ultimately dependent
upon the particular logic and set theory employed. And neither of these is a
unique thing [15].
Attempts to bring together the main branches of mathematics have continued
(e.g., category theory); but is is now generally accepted that a final systematization
will never be reached. There is no doubt that mathematics possesses an inherent
unity; nonetheless, it is equally evident that, in the final analysis, the unity of
mathematics rests on its history. This is one of the things that a teacher should learn
from studying this history.

6. Content and form

Are there any other features of mathematics as a discipline that may be inferred
from a study of its history? Let us begin with an issue which has generated a fair
amount of discussion among historians of mathematics. Do revolutions occur in
mathematics?
At first sight the answer to this question is obvious; indeed it has been given by
Hankel in 1869:
In most sciences one generation tears down what another has built, and
what one has established another undoes. In mathematics alone each
generation builds a new story to the old structure [16].
Yet, though mathematical results do not go out of date, the character of representat-
ive mathematical works has changed more than once during the long history of the
discipline. In addition, cognizance must be taken of the crises in the foundations of
mathematics, whether occasioned by the discovery of incommensurables or of
 64 V. Byers

paradoxes in set theory. Thus some historians answer the above question in the
affirmative.
Crowe takes the position that revolutions do not occur in mathematics, but do
occur in such areas as mathematical nomenclature, symbolism, and standards of
rigour as well as in meta-mathematics [17]. Such a position becomes easier to grasp if
one distinguishes between the content of mathematics and its form.
According to certain formalist definitions, mathematics has no content. Such
views, however, are of dubious value to mathematics education. We shall assume
therefore that, like other disciplines, mathematics exhibits two aspects: content and
form. Mathematics is usually classified as a formal science because form is more
prominent in present-day mathematics than it is in other sciences; indeed
mathematical form is often borrowed by other branches of knowledge. To a first
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approximation, the content of mathematics consists of its methods and results;

mathematical form involves symbolic notation and chains of logical arguments [18].
One can say then that with respect to content mathematics is the most conservative of
the disciplines, but some of the historical changes in its form can only be described as
revolutionary.
The unity of mathematics extends to a remarkable unity between its content and
its form; thus the above distinction has to be handled with care. Although proof
belongs to the form of mathematics, it is possible to speak of the content of proof.
Again, mathematical form may well be the content of an educational topic.
Moreover, much of the content of mathematics would not have been discovered if it
were not for advances in form. The "profound relation between content and form"
has been mentioned by Struik. As he says in evaluating Viete's work:
New results have often become possible because of a new mode of writing.
The introduction of HinduArabic numerals is one example; Leibniz' notation
for the calculus is another one. An adequate notation reflects reality better than
a poor one, and as such appears endowed with a life of its own which in turn
creates new life [19].
Advances in form have also made it easier to learn mathematics. Thus the
application of the method of analysis to the solution of arithmetical problems has
placed within the reach of modern school children problems that would have
stumped the best mathematicians of Europe a thousand years ago. Nonetheless,
transition from synthetic arithmetic to the analysis of algebra gives trouble to many
students. In general, it is mathematical form that often bars the way to understand-
ing and causes learning difficulties [18]. As the psychologist Ginsburg has observed:
It should be easier to calculate 23 + 18 on paper than to do it mentally. But is
it? Children often find written mathematics almost impossible to do and
instead rely on informal counting techniques or invented strategies.
In general, children's informal arithmetic is powerful, their understanding
of written symbolism is weak [20].
Thus over and above the understanding of the content of mathematics it is
mathematical form that requires attention in mathematics education.
The basic problem here seems to be that mathematical form cannot be learned
once and for all. Consider the concept of area. This can be understood in at least four
ways which form a natural progression: (1) intuitively, (2) in terms of mensuration
formulas and/or seeing areas of triangles and parallelograms in relation to that of a
 Why study the history of mathematics? 65

rectangle, (3) in terms of 'area under the curve' in calculus, and (4) via measure
theory. It would take a hardened formalist indeed to claim that the early terms of this
sequence may be omitted.
It will be observed that the above progression corresponds to two others; (a) the
varieties of mathematical objects whose areas the student has to find, and (b) the
historical order in which the concept of area has developed. Evidently mathematical
form undergoes major transformations in response to changes in contentwhile the
latter are often the result of previous changes in form. Correspondingly, a student's
understanding of mathematics becomes transformed as he learns new forms
provided this learning results from and leads to an expansion of his knowledge of
content. This of course is a statement of the genetic principle taken in the large.
A teacher has to teach and a student has to learn both aspects of mathematics, and
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the former at least has to appreciate the relationship between the two. Needless to
say, such an appreciation requires a historical perspective.

7. A model of history
It is unrealistic to present a teacher or, prospective teacher, with a 700-page
treatise on the history of mathematics; even if he reads it, he is not likely to see the
wood for the trees. He needs a manageable model of history. Let us see if such a
model cannot be provided by dividing the history of mathematics into periods in
accordance with characteristics exhibited by the dominant mathematical form.
Babylonian place-value notation notwithstanding, form was no more prominent
in Oriental pre-Hellenic mathematics than it is, say, in present-day physics. Indeed
it seems to be generally agreed that for the first two : and-a-half thousand years of its
history, mathematics was an empirical science. Nor does anyone doubt that for the
next thousand years of Greek ascendancy mathematics was first a demonstrative and
then an axiomatic science. The next period may be taken for our purposes to be the
long stretch from 400 to 1600 A.D. This was a period of computation, first in
arithmetic and then in algebra; the characteristic feature of mathematical form was
no longer the syllogism but arithmetical and algebraic symbolism. One can say that
during this period mathematics lost its axiomatic but not its demonstrative
character.
There is no question that the discovery of analytic geometry 'changed the face of
mathematics'; but it is harder to evaluate, in the terms we have been using, the status
of mathematics of the 17th and 18th centuries. One may note, however, that not only
were the most important parts of mathematics without an axiomatic base but the
discipline re-acquired some of the characteristics of an empirical science.
Mathematicians maintained close connections with experimental and observational
sciences, were more interested in results than in rigour, and used numerical
verification and incomplete induction to justify their findings. Yet one could scarcely
say that during this period mathematics ceased, to be a demonstrative science.
Perhaps, borrowing from Viete, one should call the mathematics of the period an
analytic science. In the 19th century, in 1872 to put a date on it, mathematics became
an axiomatic science once again.
Possibly it is the transitions between the above periods, rather than the
conventional 'crises', that should be thought of as revolutions in mathematics. In any
case, if our thumb-nail sketch proves anything, then it proves that it is impossible to
understand the nature of mathematics except through its history. The mere
classification of mathematics as a field of knowledge requires reference to history!
 66 Why study the history of mathematics?

In view of the difficulties associated with using history in the mathematics

classroom, we are apparently confronted with a choice. One must either admit that
apart from folklore, the odd historical curiosity, and some anecdotesthe history of
mathematics is useless to the teacher; or we have to adopt a different view of the role
of history at pre-university levels of mathematics education. As far as I am
concerned, the main reason for studying the history of mathematics is to throw some
light on the nature of mathematics. Surely it is reasonable to expect that a teacher
should have an overall conception of the subject he is teaching. It seems equally
reasonable to suggest that courses and textbooks in the history of mathematics
should be designed accordingly.

References
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[1] JONES, P. S., 1969, The history of mathematics as a teaching tool, Historical Topics for
Mathematics Classroom, edited by A. E. Hallenberg, N C T M 31st Yearbook, pp. 1-17.
[2] BYERS, V., 1976, Ontario Math. Gaz., 15, 32.
[3] POLYA, G., 1965, Mathematical Discovery II (Wiley), pp. 132-133.
[4] GRIFFITHS, H. B., and HOWSON, A. G., 1974, Mathematics: Society and Curricula
(Cambridge), pp. 158-9.
[5] MALIK, M. A., 1980, Int. J. Math. Educ. Sci. Technol., 11, 489.
[6] THOM, R., 1973, Proceedings of the Second International Congress on Mathematical
Education, Cambridge, pp. 194209.
[7] MOISE, E. E., 1965, Mathl Monthly, 72(4).
[8] COONEY, T . J., DAVIS, E. J., and HENDERSON, K. B., 1975, Dynamics of Teaching
Secondary School Mathematics (Houghton Mifflin Co.), pp. 80-81.
[9] GRATTAN-GUINNESS, I., 1973, Int. J. Math. Educ. Sci. Technol., 4, 421.
[10] GRABINER, J. V., 1975, Historia Mathematica, 2, 439.
[11] MAY, K. O., 1975, Historia Mathematica, 2, 439.
[12] LAKATOS, I., 1963, Br. J. Phil. Sci., 14, 1.
[13] THOM, R., 1971, Am. Scientist, 59, 695.
[14] PAPY, G., 1965, Maths Teacher, 58, 345.
[15] WILDER, R. L., 1969, Development of modern mathematics, Historical Topics for
Mathematics Classroom, edited by A. E. Hallenberg N C T M , 31st Yearbook,
pp. 460-476.
[16] BOYER, C. B., 1968, A History of Mathematics (Wiley), p. 598.
[17] CROWE, M. J., 1975, Historia Mathematica, 2, 161.
[18] BYERS, V., and HERSCOVICS, N., 1977, Mathematics Teaching, 81, 24.
[19] STRUIK, D. J., 1967, A Concise History of Mathematics (Dover), p . 94.
[20] GINSBURG, H., 1977, Children's Arithmetic: The Learning Process (Van Nostrand),
pp. 121 and 90.