3 ms·

"mathematics without context is soulless" is my preferred sentiment.

• dTal 10y ago
  Exactly. It's a false dichotomy between "mathematics, unadorned" and "the history of math". Philosophy is an example of a subject at the other end of the spectrum, taught almost entirely through history, yielding a strangely disjointed and unstructured experience: "Plato thought we all live in a cave. Descartes thought he might be a brain in a vat. Sarte claimed God was dead. etc..." Meanwhile the student is wondering what on earth all these looney toons have to do with each other and why she should care, because the larger framework is neglected and discredited ideas aren't pruned. I think the correct approach is to teach structure first, justification/usefulness second, and history a distant third - best reserved for explaining awkward but hard-to-change inconsistencies (such as the use of pi instead of tau as the circle constant). I would also submit that if the justification for some aspect of a subject is only historical, it should probably be dropped...