Was Euclid in Iceland when he was supposed to go?

Kristín Bjarnadóttir (1)

1 University of Iceland [Reykjavik]

In a seminar on new thinking in school mathematics, held in Royaumont, France, in 1959, one of the main speakers, Jean Dieudonné, summarized the new school-mathematics programme he had in mind in the sentence: Down with Euclid. The purpose of the article is to analyse the context in which this quote was expressed and connect it to geometry teaching in Iceland where Euclidean geometry instruction seldom had a firm ground. Euclidean geometry in an amended version gained new interest in Iceland by the introduction of the New Math in the 1960s.

Mots clés: Royaumont seminar; Dieudonné; Euclidean geometry; New Math

Domaines: Education; Histoire et perspectives sur les mathématiques [math.HO]

Kristín Bjarnadóttir. Was Euclid in Iceland when he was supposed to go?. CERME 9 - Ninth Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education, Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Education; ERME, Feb 2015, Prague, Czech Republic. pp.1790-1796. ⟨hal-01288381⟩