2007©The Montana Council of Teachers of Mathematics EDITORIAL: THE LEGACY OF ZOLTAN PAUL DIENES

The second monograph of The Montana Mathematics Enthusiast contains a unique collection of articles which span five generations of mathematics educators. As the title indicates the monograph is centered on the work of Zoltan Paul Dienes (1916-), a living legend in the field of mathematics education, for his pioneering work that has spanned 50 years. Trained as a mathematician in England, Zoltan became interested in the psychology of learning in the 1950’s and earned a second degree in psychology. Extant histories of the field of mathematics education are often outlined in terms of its origins in the classical tradition of Felix Klein onto the structuralist agenda influenced by the Bourbaki and Dieudonné at the Royaumont seminar in post world war II France, followed by Freudenthal’s reconception of mathematics education with emphasis on the humanistic element of doing mathematics (e.g., D’Ambrosio, 2003; Skovsmose, 2005). While the approaches of Klein and Dieudonné steeped in an essentialist philosophy gave way to the pragmatic approach of Freudenthal, Zoltan’s approach influenced by structuralism and cognitive psychology remains unique from the point of view of developing a theory of learning which has left a lasting impact on the field. The books Building up Mathematics (Dienes, 1960) and Thinking in Structures (Dienes & Jeeves, 1965) influenced mathematics educators entering the field in the late 1960’s and 1970’s and remain classics to date. I encountered these two books in the late 1990’s in graduat