Abstract
During the 1950s and 1960s, European societies were undergoing a period of profound transformation. One aspect of this transformation was the fundamental role played by science, both as an explanatory principle of reality, and as a vehicle for technical progress that had a tangible impact on people's living conditions.
Mathematics played a special role, on the one hand because it enabled the other sciences to formalize their results, and on the other because it was directly involved in the processes of rationalization and automation that were then at work in the economic world and beyond. Against this backdrop of an "unprecedented mathematical conjuncture", the mathematical training of young people appears to be a key issue. Traditional mathematical lectures have been criticized for being dogmatic, inefficient and unscientific. Scientific, educational and political circles joined forces to define a modernized mathematics education that would meet the demands of tomorrow's world.
Far from the image of abstraction and formalism still attached to it, the teaching of modern mathematics was born of the desire to give students the concepts and techniques that would enable them to understand and transform the world in which they lived. In France, the FRG and the GDR, the reform took a variety of forms, which can be explained by differing conceptions of the nature of mathematics, as well as by different social projects. Indeed, mathematics could be used to maintain the established order, as well as to contribute to the development of independent thought. We'll be looking at how the players involved propose different interpretations of mathematical modernity, in the service of a modernity that also takes on multiple and contradictory appearances.
