The presentation of mathematics in schools should be psychological and not systematic. The teacher, so to speak, should be a diplomat. He must take account of the psychic processes in the boy in order to grip his interest, and he will succeed only if he presents things in a form intuitively comprehensible. A more abstract presentation is only possible in the upper classes.

The teacher manages to get along still with the cumbersome algebraic analysis, in spite of its difficulties and imperfections, and avoids the smooth infinitesimal calculus, although the eighteenth century shyness toward it had long lost all point.

The presentation of mathematics in schools should be psychological and not systematic. The teacher, so to speak, should be a diplomat. He must take account of the psychic processes in the boy in order to grip his interest, and he will succeed only if he presents things in a form intuitively comprehensible. A more abstract presentation is only possible in the upper classes.

Thus, in a sense, mathematics has been most advanced by those who distinguished themselves by intuition rather than by rigorous proofs.

Everyone knows what a curve is, until he has studied enough mathematics to become confused through the countless number of possible exceptions.

Among mathematicians in general, three main categories may be distinguished; and perhaps the names logicians, formalists, and intuitionists may serve to characterize them.

Projective geometry has opened up for us with the greatest facility new territories in our science, and has rightly been called the royal road to our particular field of knowledge.