84 SCIENTIST 



ideas is already changing the attitude of many children 

 toward arithmetic. In the past, perhaps a majority have 

 emerged from school with a life-long fear and hatred of 

 anything having to do with numbers. For generations arith- 

 metic has been taught as an arbitrary set of computational 

 rules to be mastered only by the most tiresome sort of drill. 

 Insight into the real meaning of mathematics might come 

 to the near-genius in the class, but little help in this direc- 

 tion was available either from teacher or textbook. Worst 

 of all, motivation and incentive depended on fear of being 

 wrong rather than joy in being right. It is now becoming 

 clear that mathematics can be fun. Best of all, when mathe- 

 matics is fun, arithmetical accuracy follows almost pain- 

 lessly. 



All this is by way of saying that one of the first steps 

 in becoming a scientist is to go to a primary school where 

 at least some mathematics is taught by one or another of 

 the modem methods. The so-called SMSG courses worked 

 out by the School Mathematics Study Group project at 

 Yale University are the most commonly available. 



Some people already in high school will have been fortu- 

 nate enough to have had a good preparation in elementary 

 mathematics; many others will have learned how to handle 

 numbers in conventional courses without having been per- 

 manently damaged. The best students will have found out 

 for themselves how interesting mathematics can be. 



Whatever one's background when he gets to high school, 

 the student should certainly continue to take one math 

 course each year. In our best high schools it is possible to 

 gain mastery of elementary algebra, plane geometry, and 

 trigonometry, and to top this off with a sound introduction 

 to the theory of probabiUty and calculus. 



What to do with the rest of one's courses will vary ac- 

 cording to one's personal tastes and, perhaps even more 



