The recreational mathematics activities of ordinary nineteenth century Americans: A case study of two mathematics puzzle columns and their contributors

Abstract

This study analyses two American recreational mathematics columns from the end of the nineteenth century—one from Atlanta, Georgia’s Sunny South and one from Wilmington, Delaware’s Delaware Gazette and State Journal. Each was an active forum, used by ordinary, educated laypeople to participate in a culture of mathematics by contributing problems and solutions, and in some cases entering into heated discussions. This period was one of dramatic change in American mathematics, in which researchers, educators and textbook authors ended their isolation from developments in Europe and shifted emphasis from rote procedures and practical calculations toward reasoning about abstract mathematics. The mathematics columns in Sunny South and the Delaware Gazette reflect these two different views of mathematics that were percolating in American culture at the time and offer a window into the mathematical beliefs and understanding of the ordinary Americans who contributed to them.