In search for the early roots of the European Modern Mathematics Movement

The origins of the European modern mathematics movement are to be situated in the early 1950s within the International Commission for the Study and Improvement of Mathematics Teaching. ln 1952, Caleb Gattegno, the actual animator of the Commission, managed to bring the Bourbakists together with the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget on the theme of "mathematical and mental structures." A connection was established between the structures in the work of Bourbaki and the structures of children's cognitive development as revealed by Piaget. For that reason, it was argued that the didactics of mathematics needed to be rethought from the Bourbaki perspective on mathematical structures. A model for the science of mathematics gradually became a model for mathematics education.