David Eugene Smith

David Eugene Smith was a mathematician, mathematics educator, historian, and long-serving Teachers College professor. The Outlook for Arithmetic in America reflects his interest in how mathematics should be taught, while The Hindu-Arabic Numerals traces the development and transmission of number symbols. Smith produced many mathematical textbooks and scholarly works, edited major mathematics journals, and participated in the International Commission on the Teaching of Mathematics. He also assembled an important historical mathematics collection later associated with Columbia University. The Hindu-Arabic Numerals was written with Louis Charles Karpinski and first published by Ginn and Company in 1911. Read together, these two titles show the range of Smith's scholarship: one looks toward American classroom practice, and the other reconstructs a long history of notation through documentary evidence.