Once Upon a Time in Math · SSMCIS-columbia

ONCE UPON A TIME IN MATH

A Sputnik-era plan to teach kids advanced mathematics quietly lives on

Vered Zimmerman

February 2026

1.

The Russians placed Sputnik 1 in orbit on October 4, 1957, making sure everyone could hear it. The rocket sending it up there had the range to reach America, but this was almost an aside. What mattered more was that the Soviets had made space theirs, and the Americans did not. Invisible in the night’s sky, the United States could nonetheless feel it, looking down, mocking.

2.

I used to go back and stop time, right before math class on the first week of middle school. In the hall, young children are frozen in motion, scrambling to get into rooms. I would lean against a wall and gaze at twelve-year-old me. To her, this new school seems huge. Some of the older kids look like adults, how is that even possible. She wonders if she counts as chubby.

Knowing what’s about to happen, I used to look at her and think about choices and luck. Other times, I would try to glimpse nature from nurture. Until, one day, she slowly turns her head and looks back at me, worried. “Leave me alone,” she says, “it’s class now.” So that day I walked away from her for the last time.

3.

Even before Sputnik, the US was concerned its math education was too uneven, too aimless. In 1950 the Americans set up the National Science Foundation (NSF), to invest in science research and education. In 1955, the College Entrance Examination Board appointed a special commission to suggest changes to how math is taught in high school, so students arrive at university better prepared.

The trouble was, math had progressed as rapidly as any of the other sciences, but school kids were still being taught the best and the finest of seventeenth-century wisdom. Math education rarely grabs headlines, but suddenly it was the space age.

4.

The five-year period that ushered in the American "New Math" era reads very much like an Agatha Christie mystery. Among the characters are:

The savvy academic, Ed Begle. He’s the director of the School Mathematics Study Group (SMSG). It was launched in 1958 by the American Mathematical Society and funded by the NSF, to spur new textbooks and curricula for K-12 math education.

The diplomat, Howard Franklin Fehr. A prolific math-education scholar and the head of the mathematics department at Teachers College, New York.

The eccentric Frenchman, Jean Dieudonné.

It’s 1959, and the Americans are all staring down fabulous wealth, so to speak. The NSF annual budget has just been tripled, to $134 million, with an urgent mission to do something about science education. Within a decade, it’ll grow to $500 million per year.

They and others gather in a countryside abbey at Royaumont, France, and a murder is announced. The Frenchman, Dieudonné, rises to give his speech and calls out: “Down with Euclid! Death to Triangles!”

Dieudonné’s fury was over the months and years schools devote to Euclidean geometry. It has axioms – basic principles assumed to be true, from which all else must follow. One axiom looks dodgy, like you could prove it from the others. For two millennia, people have tried and failed. But dropping it makes geometry seemingly nonsensical, so it remained an axiom.

Alas, from at least the early nineteenth century it was known many other geometries exist, some just as physical, where this axiom just isn’t true. It was outrageous, said Dieudonné, to keep teaching kids “geometry” without ever teaching geometry. To add insult to injury, most school math is grounded in procedural calculations; the only time pupils ever learn to prove anything is in geometry…

Howard Fehr had prepared the final Rayoumond report, published in 1961. There, Dieudonné’s remarks appear as “Euclid must go!”, and it remains the conference’s most cited moment. Other common themes in talks were the urgent need to build reasoning and abstraction skills.

A set of guidelines on how to do it came in the form of a report, “Goals for School Mathematics”, with ideas hashed out by Begle and top-tier mathematicians in a 1963 gathering at Cambridge, Mass. This report laid the foundation for the New Math wave in the US.

5.

New Math is remembered as a failed experiment, a bad relationship. As often happens in breakups, this retelling excludes the honeymoon period, when America fell madly in love with math. Starting in the late 50s, pop culture couldn’t get enough.

For reading material, candy-coloured book covers pitched math as hot and cool.

Covers of popular-math books, 1957-1965. Source: Ebay

At the movies, Disney got an Oscar nod for "Mathmagicland", where a spirit guides Donald Duck through a technicolour "wonderland of mathematics.” Four years later, "The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics" won the award in the short film category.

Or you could just watch TV. For adults, NBC produced “The Bedrock of Logical Thought”, a ten-part math talk show(!) For...