This article describes a research on students’ views of what constitutes good mathematics teaching. A questionnaire with open ended questions was given to 106 students in six different mathematics classes, with five different teachers, in four different ...

‘Modern math’ was implemented in Icelandic schools at all levels in the 1960s. It was introduced to parents at meetings and by media articles, interviews and a television programme in 17 episodes. It is argued that the information was presented by ...

The treatise Algorismus is a complete prose translation of the Latin hexameter Carmen de Algorismo into the medieval Old Norse language. Carmen is dated in 1202, written by the French canon Alexander de Villa-Dei. The treatise explains for the first ...

Mathematics education in Iceland was behind that of its neighbouring countries up to the 1960s, when radical ideas of implementing logic and set theory into school mathematics reached Iceland, mainly from Denmark. Introduction of ‘modern’ mathematics ...

In this paper two nineteenth century Icelandic arithmetic textbooks are investigated, both written according to the late medieval tradition of libri di abbaco, practical textbooks. The authors were influenced by the German Protestant tradition that ...

In a seminar on new thinking in school mathematics, held in Royaumont, France, in 1959, one of the main speakers, Jean Dieudonné, summarized the new schoolmathematics programme he had in mind in the sentence: Down with Euclid. The purpose of the article ...

The importance of understanding concepts and procedures is emphasized in most mathematics textbooks written in Iceland, from the earliest writings in Icelandic up to present day. Simultaneously, assertions are found at regular intervals that the emphasis ...

During the centuries, ordinary people in Iceland had few opportunities to study mathematics and few reasons to apply it. Instead, Icelanders have composed verses since medieval times, adhering to complex rules of rhymes and alliteration. They have ...

Arithmetic textbooks, which appeared in Iceland in the eighteenth century in print and in manuscripts, adhered to the pattern of European practical textbooks, originating among Italian merchants in the late Middle Ages. Their content was numeration, ...

Björn Gunnlaugsson (1788–1876) was a remarkable product of the Enlightenment movement in Iceland. He was never admitted to a school, but learnt mathematics by himself and from his tenant-farmer father before he entered the University of Copenhagen, ...