David Eugene Smith was the dean of American mathematics educators, and The Teaching of Geometry (1911) is his considered answer to a question then fiercely debated: what is school geometry for? Smith walks through the history of Euclid in the classroom, the case for and against rigour, and then, proposition by proposition, how each book of elementary geometry can be brought to life.
His examples — leaning towers, shadow-reckoning, the surveyor’s chain — are chosen to show geometry as human inheritance rather than drill. Download the free EPUB for a wise book that teachers of mathematics still quote a century on.