Introduction

Interdisciplinary research in history is a resource that can provide knowledge in breadth and in depth not only of the subjects that have traditionally been studied—historical facts—but of others related to different areas of knowledge.

In this sense, the History of Education can contribute valuable understanding of the phenomena, institutions, and academic disciplines of schools. Research in this field has included analyses of the development and evolution of particular concepts throughout history, and studies of the pedagogical approaches that have been taken in their teaching and learning. Other work has reviewed, and in many cases retrieved, the materials that have been used in schools in teaching a particular area of science.

Indeed, in our opinion, these approaches [15] represent the main thrust of studies in the field of the History of Education, including much interesting work in the area of mathematics teaching and learning. But our own interest is principally didactic, so that our focus has been on how the results of these inquiries can be transferred to the classroom as an educational resource for teachers [12, 13]. Similar work carried out by other researchers has been centred on the context of undergraduate education [21, 22, 23, 19].

One of these researchers, [16, p. 5], makes a number of suggestions for the use of the History of Mathematics in the classroom:

1. Mention anecdotes of mathematics from the past.

2. Provide historical introductions to concepts that are new for the pupils.

3. […]