Vakkotaur

I've heard references to "the new math" from time to time and from what I can gather it was a change in the teaching of mathematics that happened as a reaction to the launch of Sputnik. Since Sputnik I was launched in 1957 and I was born rather later, I never encountered whatever the "old math" was. It seemed strange that were "old" and "new" versions of math. Didn't numbers work the same, after all?

I've heard Tom Lehrer's song, New Math which has this in the introduction:

Consider the following subtraction problem, which I will put up here: 342 - 173.

 342
-173
----

Now remember how we used to do that. Three from two is nine; carry the one, and if you're under 35 or went to a private school you say seven from three is six, but if you're over 35 and went to a public school you say eight from four is six; carry the one so we have 169, but in the new approach, as you know, the important thing is to understand what you're doing rather than to get the right answer. Here's how they do it now.

Three from two is nine? Seven from three is six? Eight from four is six? These are alien ways of describing things to someone who got taught the "New Math" method which the song describes. I didn't think much about it until recently as I wondered if the New Math really is an impediment to getting a problem solved. I decided to see if I could make sense of the odd, to me, lines in the introduction.

( Arithmetic, revisited )