I've been to Huntsville, AL, and gone through the used bookstores looking for old physics & math books. They're all in _German_! (i.e., not in French). I can therefore say with certainty that the new math had no effect on the Apollo program (thank god). The major problem with new math (I had some exposure to both old & new math in junior high) is that the teachers didn't know anything about abstract set theory, either, and so it was the blind leading the blind. There is a serious problem with motivation of abstract concepts without concrete examples as rationale. Thus, I had an abstract commutative algebra course in graduate school, but didn't have the corresponding undergraduate background. I followed it 100% as pure abstractions, as none of the examples made any sense to me. I think I got an "A" in the course, but I do _not_ recommend this procedure, as it was "pure" hell. (Teach no abstraction before its time...) At 01:14 AM 10/22/03 -0400, Richard Petti wrote:
O The feds introduced "the new math" into the schools in the 1960s to optimize the education of the more math-able students from whom the nation's technical manpower comes. Fear of Sputnik (read: fear of an untouchable missile base on the moon in the hands of a hostile superpower) caused the feds to take this unorthodox step. The new math taught arithmetic and algebra in terms of sets, mappings, associatitivity, commutativity etc. instead of memorizing computational rules. However, it made life more difficult for abstraction-challenged students, who now had to learn strange abstractions in addition to learning procedural math. The new math was gradually killed in public schools in the 1970s and 1980s. The new math books (the best of which were author by Mary Dolciani) were replaced by procedural math books ('i' before 'e' except after 'c'), the most popular of which were written by John Saxon.