Christopher J. Phillips is assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Department of History.
<i>The New Math</i>is ambitious, rich, and remarkably well-written. During the middle decades of the twentieth century, many groups struggled to articulate what mathematics is, what mathematicians actually do, and how a new approach to mathematics instruction could craft ideal citizens in America s schools. Mathematics teaching became a symbolic arena to sort out competing notions of proper thinking in the nuclear age.Drawing upon an impressive range of sources, Phillips vividly charts the surprising plasticity of mathematics among professional scholars and the voting public in Cold War America. --David Kaiser, MIT author of How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival