Three Times Political Conflict Reshaped American Mathematics

World War II and the events leading up to it influenced mathematics in an entirely different way.

In April 1933, Hitler introduced the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which excluded Jews and others from employment, including involvement in organizations and professorships. Many Jewish scholars or scholars with Jewish families began to seek refuge in the U.S.

Hermann Weyl and his family, for example, had moved from Zürich to Göttingen, Germany, for him to assume the chair of mathematics in 1930. By 1933, however, with his wife and children identified as Jewish, Weyl accepted one of the first faculty positions at the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Once there, Weyl worked with colleagues to help other mathematicians find a home in America. This influx of talented European mathematicians included Richard Courant, Emil Artin and Emmy Noether. Their arrival catapulted American mathematics to a new level of international acclaim.
This advancement of American mathematics came at the expense of German mathematics. In 1934, the Nazi minister of culture asked the great Göttingen Professor of Mathematics David Hilbert whether the mathematics institute at Göttingen had suffered since the removal of the Jews. “Suffered?” Hilbert responded. “It hasn’t suffered, Herr Minister. It just doesn’t exist anymore.”

New Math

The launch of Sputnik, the Soviet Union’s first satellite, in October 1957 led to another shift in American mathematics, this time at the K-12 level.

During World War II, the U.S. government realized that many Americans were deficient in arithmetic, geometry and trigonometry. A national shortage of mathematics teachers didn’t help matters. Still, very little reform took place immediately after the war.

Sputnik changed all of that. The U.S. now considered how to build a strong sense of scientific prowess and national security within the American populace. The School Mathematics Study Group, the National Science Foundation-funded group that included research mathematicians and schoolteachers, aimed to produce textbooks for every grade of K-12 that explained the “why” of mathematics along with the “how.” Their approach became infamously known as New Math.

The School Mathematics Study Group worked within an American culture that began to rethink its view of mathematics. Suddenly, mathematics was linked with national security. Politicians endorsed this new approach to math. Parents attended classes to learn how to help their children with the New Math. Teachers attended training sessions.

In the end, however, the introduction of the program occurred so swiftly that educators could not keep up with the materials, when they simply did not understand. Meanwhile, the approach proved uneven for students. For example, students might understand the commutative law that allows multiplication of integers in any order, but not the multiplication table it relies on for the computation.

Nationalism and political agendas were not enough to make the program successful. Taken together, these three historical events show how political conflict can help or harm the advancement of mathematics.