Joseph Diez Gergonne was born on June 19, 1771, in the parish of St. Roch at Nancy, just a few years after this city had been transformed into a center of artistic elegance. Indeed, his father had been one of the artists who had had a part in the creation of this wonderland of lavish grace.
During the last half of the nineteenth century there was a great revival of interest in the field of geometry. A large part of this interest had its origin in a simple problem submitted to a contemporary mathematical periodical by a French army officer. The problem was to find a point O within a triangle ABC such that the angles OAB, OBC and OCA would be equal. The name of the army captain who submitted the problem was Brocard—Pierre René Jean-Baptiste Henri Brocard.
Doring the Spring of 1934, plans for the revision of the curriculum at Hunter College were initiated. Questionnaires, asking for expressions of opinion concerning a “hypothetical curriculum” were distributed among members of the staff. There was a great deal of discussion with repeated references to the student who “simply could not do mathematics.” It was surprising to see how many members of the staff believed that there was a person, of normal intelligence, who had satisfactorily completed necessary prerequisite course, a person with normal background and training, willing to spend the required amount of time and thought in study and preparation, who could master every obstacle except mathematics. Some of the statements which were made seemed like a challenge to some of the members of the staff in the Mathematics Department. But when confronted with the questions,—“Why is the percentage of failures so high in mathematics” and “What picture does the failure in mathematics present,”—what could one answer? One could always say that Miss A failed because of lack of diligence; or that Miss B failed because she was inadequately prepared for the course; but one did not have sufficient data to venture from the particular to the general. Thus the following investigation concerning the failure in prescribed mathematics was undertaken.
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