> In substance, my correspondent disagrees completely with the current fad
> that encourages teaching of the (so-called) History of Mathematics either
> to undergraduates or to normal mathematics graduates when both his/her
> general historical background and or intellectual maturity are below a
> reasonable (whatever the term means) threshold:
>
> "Of course, a lecturer should make the occasional historical
> remark, and it should be well founded. But it is not possible to
> acquire historical knowledge about the Renaissance authors without
> reading Italian, about the Baroque authors without Latin, about
> the 18th/19th century authors without French. And even for Peano
> we also need latine sine flexione. Every translation is already
> an interpretation. Second hand clothes may be acceptable; second
> hand knowledge is not."
Should we then not teach the Bible to those who can't read Hebrew and
Greek, not teach Dante to those who can't read Italian? Should we stop
teaching mathematics to those Engineering students who can never quite "get
it"?
It would seem to me that one can only be a speciallist in a small handful
of subjects, and this attitude would then condemn all of us to know nothing
of all other subjects. That seems a mistake to me.
Rather, I'd like to see all mathematics students having at least one
history course and, yes, be confronted with the gaps in their own knowledge
thereby revealed. (Languages are only the beginning of it. My students in
general don't have much knowledge of history in general, so their amazing
ignorance of the historical context of the mathematics we investigate
becomes clear at every turn.) The goal of such a course is not to create
historians, but rather, it seems to me, to (a) whet their appetites for
more history, (b) increase their understanding of the mathematics they are
learning, and (c) open their eyes to a whole range of knowledge in which
they will probably never be experts but which they can learn to appreciate.
As Ubi d'Ambrosio has pointed out, it can also serve as a tool to lead
students to reflect on the role of culture, society, and politics in the
mathematics they do, and hence give them a chance to think about their work
in a more responsible way.
Those seem completely valid things to achieve. If the thing is done right,
none of these students will leave the course thinking they are historians,
but they will have had their horizons widened a bit. What's wrong with that?
Fernando
============================================================================
Fernando Q. Gouvea
Chair, Dept. of Math & CS Editor, MAA Online
Colby College http://www.maa.org
fqgouvea@colby.edu
Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
-- Euripides