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Premature Abstraction*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2016

W C. Fletcher
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Extract

I have long been convinced that the teaching of mathematics suffers from the premature introduction of abstraction without adequate attention to the concrete facts from which the abstractions are derived. Perhaps I cannot better begin my argument than by taking as text a passage from the end of the first chapter of Todhunter’s Differential Calculus :

Type
Research Article
Information
The Mathematical Gazette , Volume 24 , Issue 259 , May 1940 , pp. 73 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © Mathematical Association 1940

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Footnotes

*

[Mr. Fletcher has placed the Association still further in his debt by writing for the Gazette an article embodying the material which would have formed the basis of the Presidential Address which, had it not been for the war, he would have delivered at the 1940 Annual Meeting.—Editor.]

References

* [Mr. Fletcher has placed the Association still further in his debt by writing for the Gazette an article embodying the material which would have formed the basis of the Presidential Address which, had it not been for the war, he would have delivered at the 1940 Annual Meeting.—Editor.]