Education: Appetizer

Professor Howard Fehr, head of the mathematics department at Columbia Teachers College, is generally an amiable man. but he can become blunt when talking about the abuse his subject takes in the average U.S. school. "The mathematical education of most math teachers," says he, "ends in the ninth grade.'' They teach arithmetic as if it involved nothing more than totting up grocery bills or figuring compound interest, completely fail to give their pupils any glimpse into the concepts that lie behind the subject. Last year Fehr took on the job of collaborating with TV Producer Richard Pack of the Westinghouse Broadcasting Co. on a TV show that might whet the mathematical appetites of children around junior high-school age. Result: a pleasant, nine-part series called Adventures in Number and Space, now being shown once a week over regular TV channels in New York, Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland. Pittsburgh and San Francisco.

Chief actors on the show are Bil Baird and his marionettes Snarky and Gargle. Under Snarky's eager questioning and Gargle's perpetual doubting, Baird traces the history of mathematics from the days when the caveman could count only "one, two, one, two, and a heap.'' He describes the earliest numerals, explains the origin of the decimal system, shows how ancient merchants used their counting boards, stages a computation race with an abacus expert, tells about the discovery of zero." Now I heard every thing," grumbles Gargle. "Zero— zero means nothin' Baird, and you say the discovery of nothin' is a world-shaking event." In dealing with modern computers, Baird must include a quick explanation of the binary system.* He works his way into algebra with the equation T =C/4 + 37—the outside Fahrenheit temperature equals the number of times a cricket chirps in a quarter of a minute plus 37. After algebra come geometry, trigonometry, and the theory of probability that was discovered when Gambler Chevalier de Meré asked Pascal to figure out his chances of winning a dice game when interrupted at any particular moment. The high point of the series is a show on the new field of topology. Using every sort of trick—from figuring out how a boy can cover his newspaper route without ever retracing his steps, to taking off his vest without removing his coat—Baird gradually gets across the idea that topology is merely "the study of what remains unchanged in a thing," even when the shape of the thing has been completely altered, short of being torn or cut.

Last week Fehr and Pack had every reason to believe that they had a hit. From everyone from M.I.T. Mathematician W. T. Martin ("an imaginative presentation") to U.S. Education Commissioner Lawrence G. Derthick ("one of the best current films on mathematics"), the compliments poured in. But Professor Fehr and Producer Pack had one word of warning. The series is in no way meant to be a "course" in mathematics, but "a kind of mathematical hors d'oeuvre, an appetizer, a stimulant."