Do Teachers Need to Include the History of Mathematics in Their Teaching? (2003)
Probably not.  It&#x27;s interesting to plow through Newman&#x27;s four volume &quot;The World of Mathematics&quot; as a grad student, but inflicting mathematical history on ordinary school kids is cruel.  They don&#x27;t need that much math.<p>Unless you&#x27;re a mathematician, math should be viewed as a tool, like a lathe.  You don&#x27;t need to know the history of the lathe, and how Maudslay made it a precision machine tool.  (His original lathe is in the Kensington Science Museum. It&#x27;s one of those historic artifacts which looks very different from its predecessors, and it&#x27;s successors look a lot like it.)<p>Few people need to know how to build up mathematics from minimal axioms. Nobody should have to struggle through Whitehead and Russell below the PhD level. We have power tools for that now. The original Boyer-Moore theorem prover from 1992 can build up constructive number theory from the axioms in under a minute.[1]  I fixed it up recently to run on GNU Common Lisp and put it on Github, so it&#x27;s runnable on modern machines.<p>There&#x27;s certainly no excuse for inflicting Newton&#x27;s notation for calculus on kids. It&#x27;s not even clear that classical geometry proof approaches are that useful.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;John-Nagle&#x2F;nqthm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;John-Nagle&#x2F;nqthm</a>