The School Mathematics Study Group (SMSG) was an American academic

think tank A think tank, or public policy institute, is a research institute that performs research and advocacy concerning topics such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, technology, and culture. Most think tanks are non-governme ...

focused on the subject of reform in

mathematics education In contemporary education, mathematics education—known in Europe as the didactics or pedagogy of mathematics—is the practice of teaching, learning, and carrying out Scholarly method, scholarly research into the transfer of mathematical know ...

. Directed by Edward G. Begle and financed by the

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, the group was created in 1958 in the wake of the

Sputnik crisis The Sputnik crisis was a period of public fear and anxiety in Western nations about the perceived technological gap between the United States and Soviet Union caused by the Soviets' launch of '' Sputnik 1'', the world's first artificial sate ...

and tasked with creating and implementing

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

curricula In education, a curriculum (; : curriculums or curricula ) is the totality of student experiences that occur in an educational process. The term often refers specifically to a planned sequence of instruction, or to a view of the student's experi ...

for

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and

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, which it did until its termination in 1977. The efforts of the SMSG yielded a reform in mathematics education known as New Math which was promulgated in a series of reports, culminating in a series published by

Random House Random House is an imprint and publishing group of Penguin Random House. Founded in 1927 by businessmen Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer as an imprint of Modern Library, it quickly overtook Modern Library as the parent imprint. Over the foll ...

called the ''New Mathematical Library'' (Vol. 1 is Ivan Niven's ''Numbers: Rational and Irrational''). In the early years, SMSG also produced a set of draft textbooks in typewritten paperback format for elementary, middle and high school students. Perhaps the most authoritative collection of materials from the School Mathematics Study Group is now housed in the

Archives of American Mathematics The Archives of American Mathematics, located at the University of Texas at Austin, aims to collect, preserve, and provide access to the papers principally of American mathematicians and the records of American mathematical organizations. Histor ...

in the

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's Center for American History.

References

External links

Mathematics education Curricula {{Math-org-stub

See also

References

Further reading

External links